Especially if you’re the owner of a £7m 15-bedroom Tudor Mansion with sky-high energy bills.
Novelist and economist Giles Keating bought Athelhampton House in Dorset in 2019. The property’s energy bills cost around £55,000 a year and then later double after the Ukraine-Russia war broke out.
The property is a Grade 1 listed country home and had a high carbon footprint with 100 tons a year and was heated on LPG and Kerosene.
Mr Keating decided to make the property carbon neutral, so he removed all oil burners, gas overs and boilers and opted for ground and air-source heat pumps and large Tesla Powerwall batteries.
Two years later, Mr Keating and Stefan Pitman, the architect who is a specialist in historic buildings, have eco-retrofit the home at a cost of three quarters of a million pounds. However, the property now costs nothing to heat, with minimal annual service charge for the maintenance of the solar panels and heat pumps.
The project was carried out in three phases with the main infrastructure works beginning in early 2021. The heating technology was added six months later, and the house renovations began in 2022.
The house also boasts 100 kilowatts of solar PV (photovoltaics) which have been designed so sheep can graze, with heat pumps hidden away underneath the ground as well.
The heating was added gradually in a five-month period to let the building adjust. The rooms can be heated up to 21C. With the temperature being controlled more effectively from Keating’s phone, it means that the building is being a lot better preserved, with the “timber decay that was present not longer there.”
The house is now the warmest it’s been in it’s entire history. The manor dates to 1086 and the name Athelhampton appears in the 13th century, when the house belonged to the de Loundres family. The house is visited by over 25,000 people a year, who are unlikely to know it’s net zero properties.
Keating says “We had some Tudor re-enactment people stay the night recently in the four-poster beds and they couldn’t believe how comfortable and warm it was. They did complain about the ghosts, but that’s just the way it is.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/britains-first-net-zero-stately-home-times-luxury-m3g7c7w96
