Eco Extension: Green Gables Family Home

Green Gables is a family home in Somerset, consisting of two attached buildings. Living up to its name: The owners of Green Gables were motivated by the environmental benefits, to reduce their carbon footprint whilst also saving on running costs and ending their reliance on oil heating.

Renewable installer, Evergreen, a Kensa-accredited installer since 2015, designed a perfect-fit system for the family home that meets all heating and hot water demands. Slinky ground array pipework was installed in trenches across the land of the property to extract heat from the ground. Due to the two dwellings, two 15kW Kensa Evo ground source heat pumps (GSHPs) were fitted, one to each building. The Evo GSHPs were connected via a Shared Ground Loop Array, Kensa’s pioneering approach, which transfers ambient-temperature heat energy from the ground arrays to each individual GSHPs located inside each of the dwellings.

Green Gables’ sustainability was improved further by the GSHP system being coupled with a ground-mounted Solar PV system. The system utilises solar energy and converts it into electricity; it cleverly exports the surplus electricity generated and imports when there is not enough sunlight. Evergreen installed two SolarEdge immersion controllers, which send spare generated power from the Solar PV system to the immersions heaters – making the most of self-generating power and losing less to the grid.
The owners of Green Gables is able to monitor how much power is being generated by the Solar PV system, so they can adapt the settings to utilise as much of the free self-generated power as possible.

Key Facts
• Supplying heating & hot water to two separate dwellings
• Retrofit installation
• Replacing oil heating
• Slinky ground arrays – Shared Ground Loop Array system
• Two x 15kW three-phase Evo heat pumps
• Coupled with Solar PV

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