Please note this date – Tuesday 11th July 2023 – this was the day we stopped using gas for anything at the Community Centre and moved towards using a newly installed Air Source Heat Pump for our hot water and heating. In actual fact we turned off the Centre’s heating over two months ago on May 7th when we celebrated the Coronation Village Lunch – with all the doors wide open, and about 2 weeks later we turned off the gas completely. Since then, we have only used our solar powered immersion heater for hot water. Overall, during the 2 month period June-July we have been broadly carbon neutral, exporting far more electricity from our solar panels than importing it.
After the ASHP is installed, we expect to increase the amount of electricity we consume and so, to maximise our self-generation and rebalance our electricity production with our consumption we will be installing another battery in the next few months. We will probably continue to export some electricity at various times as amazingly we have exported some electricity every month of the year – we expect our consumption to increase but we will probably be completely self-sufficient from around late February/ March to October/November despite not using any gas. We look forward to seeing the data as the year passes.
