Some recent excitement: at very short notice I was contacted by a producer – John Neal – of You and Yours from the BBC. He’d heard from Touchwood Homes that they had a client who made money from his fuel bills – a real headline catcher!
The long and short of it is that we were then contacted by a reporter – Bob Walker – who came to Porter’s and spent couple of hours with us. This got edited down to some 7 minutes. Despite our nervousness at the sheer novelty of such an experience, we were not made to sound foolish. Instead I think Bob did an excellent editing job and succeeded in extracting the essence of what it’s all about.
See what you think: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01q7zsm.
This has kicked a minor flood of friends saying how good they thought it was – clearly You & Yours has an even larger audience than we thought.
Now let’s get this in perspective. Almost anyone with a full set of PV panels (4kWp) is likely to have negative electricity bills. We actually use more electricity than we did in our old, inefficient house, because everything that doesn’t depend on wood or sunlight uses electricity. We do all our cooking with electricity instead of most of it by gas. The MVHR uses about 1 kWh a day. And there’s a (OK, quite small) pump with the solar thermal system. But even with the less generous Feed-in-Tariff, as explained in the post Autumn (and Summer) 2013, you’ll have to be pretty reckless with the electric to have bills more than what you get paid. The important point is that the house is efficient, so it doesn’t really matter what you use to heat it with – you don’t use much of it. Thank you, BBC, for keeping that in.