My Passion With Mark Woodward

So what happens next when you have just bought a farmhouse, circa 1800, with attached barn, two other collections of outbuildings and 10 acres of land?

This was the wonderful opportunity and challenge facing me and my partner Sarah Brown in November 2003. We had both renovated properties before but this was on a completely different scale. I started to research ways of tackling the project and was soon spending hours at exhibitions, reading magazines, watching programmes such as Grand Designs and searching on the internet. It didn’t take long for me to realise that we would have to take a radical approach to the renovation, if the family were to live in such a large property sustainably.

Meanwhile, we set about getting our smallholding off the ground by bringing in Tamworth pigs, creating a vegetable plot, planting an orchard and making food products.

Walking into the National Homebuilding and Renovating Show at the NEC in 2004, I was completely overwhelmed by a vast range of unfamiliar technologies such as heat pumps, under-floor heating, electricity generators, mechanical ventilation and insulation systems. A core part of the plan was to put in under-floor heating driven by ground source heat pumps which I installed with the help of a friend, Clive Quarmby. We spent many weeks digging trenches, laying pipes, soldering, fitting valves etc. Sarah was pregnant with our son, Arthur, while all this was going on.

Heat pumps need electricity to work and so we decided that we would have to make our own electricity to meet our objective of becoming energy neutral. Solar panels were about three times more expensive than they are now and were much more expensive than wind turbines compared with the amount of electricity they were likely to make. So, we bought a six kilowatt Proven wind turbine expecting it to make about 10,000 kilowatt hours per year. It didn’t, it made 14,000 kilowatt hours per year – fantastic.

The only trouble was we were using a lot more electricity than I had anticipated despite investing thousands of pounds on insulation and high-tech glazing. We now have a four kilowatt solar power system which generates about 4,000 kilowatt hours a year and have just installed a 10 kilowatt Xzeres wind turbine which hopefully will take us to our energy-neutral goal.

Every week I write down statistics from our systems. This is hopelessly inefficient and so I am now working with Sheffield University to install a data-logging system that will record everything automatically. Then I will be able to broadcast the outcomes of my obsession via a constant real time feed to our website for anyone to follow.