Energy Auditing process & Solar Panel Installations.

Due to the recent energy crisis and to further our circular economy credentials, The Burnt Hill Herb Co. have recently been working with the West Yorkshire combined authority (WYCA) to carry out an energy audit to establish where and how we can be more energy efficient on our farm site. 

The innovative nature of our farming methods mean that (after fish feed) one of our largest financial commitments every year is our electricity supply cost, and the recent huge escalations in energy prices have forced us to look very carefully and closely at our energy consumption levels.

Back in September 2022 we worked with a local electrical renewable energy expert "Coretech Electrical Services" who are based very close to us near the Holme valley. After considerable consultation and communications with the team at Coretech we had a state-of-the-art 5kW Solar panel array installed on the roof of our food processing building, the purpose of this investment was to further our commitment to reduce our carbon footprint and to ensure that a large proportion of our energy was actually coming from a reputable renewable source.

In October 2022 we then attended a very useful and informative energy audit workshop, run by WYCA in Leeds, to learn about many energy saving methods and specialist equipment that could be utilised to measure and control our consumption, we began to realise that there was still much work to be done.

We installed a selection of smart energy controllers and consumption measuring devices around our site, this enabled us to add dynamic timers and schedules to our most heavily-consuming devices and also to program our working lights to automatically turn off on a preset even if we left a light switch on by mistake, all of this tech is controlled from an app environment on a tablet. We also started to calculate on some spreadsheets to interpret the data-set coming back from our smart devices to compute exactly how many kWh we were consuming and precisely which pumps and processes were contributing to those figures. We quickly realised that we could benefit hugely from an additional Solar-photovoltaic array to further assist in reducing our financial and carbon commitments on our farm site in Farnley Tyas.

So after a long consultation period with WYCA we finally managed to secure a grant with some financial assistance to install a further Solar-photovoltaic array.

Once again we welcomed back the team from Coretech last week, who skilfully and carefully installed a further 5kW of Solar photovoltaic panels for us in a ground array formation on site.

On a recent sunny day we managed to achieve 59% grid independency on our consumption, which is a fantastic achievement. We are very grateful for the investment WYCA managed to secure for us for the additional ground array system and also the professional team at Coretech who helped to deliver the project in a timely manner.