Lucy Dixon spoke to Jez Climas, Head of Renewable Heat at Midsummer, who explains why the company is perfectly placed to capitalise on the shift towards home energy management systems.
Midsummer had been a wholesaler of solar PV for a long time and wanted to expand to offer heat pumps too, so Jez Climas, a chartered engineer who who was one of the leaders at Max Fordham’s Cambridge office, was an obvious choice to head this part of the business. He explains: “My background in consultancy and all that experience of carefully selecting the components to go together to make a system really work, I’m able to do that for the installers who buy from us and bring it together in a really easy-to-install kit.”
As Jez mentions, Midsummer mainly deal with installers. He says: “The biggest sector we’ve got at the moment is renewable installation companies doing largely one-off stuff. Our point of contact is normally the installation company.”
The demand for both heat pumps and solar is coming from various places, Jez explains, with the able-to-pay market of homeowners investing to cut both carbon and energy bills, plus the ECO work and projects for social landlords. He says: “Social landlords are looking at the combination of heat pumps and solar, so they can decarbonise their stock and also keep residents’ bills down.
“We’re finding that for local authority work, we’re selling a lot of the older Samsung GEN6 heat pumps, which are very keenly priced. Whereas with the able-to-pay customers, we’re selling more of the Vaillant aroTHERM plus and also Stiebel Eltrons. But also the new EHS Mono HT Quiet from Samsung – we pre-sold nearly all of our first delivery of those, there is a lot of interest.”
Although Jez’s main area of expertise is heat pumps, he also knows a lot about solar so talks to lots of customers about projects that involve both. “That’s one thing that we’re really excited about. At the moment heat pumps and solar don’t really talk to each other, which is a real missed opportunity, because there’s lots of clever things you can do to further improve the running costs with the two technologies together.”
These clever things include the Homely smart thermostat, which is designed specifically for use with heat pumps. “It’s a heat pump flow temperature controller, that optimises the flow temperature of the heat pump all the time to get the best efficiency. And also it can integrate with smart tariffs. It’ll figure out the cheapest way to run the pump to provide the comfort conditions you’ve asked for.”
Combining solar with battery storage
Another solution Jez is testing is linking that ability to solar and a battery system as well. He says: “To make them work together and do things like let the solar charge the battery and then once the battery is charged and you start exporting, then the pump immediately kicks in to heat the hot water, so it’s really clever stuff to maximise the benefit you get – and the Homely itself isn’t a very expensive item. We’re signing up alpha testers who don’t mind living with the PV part of the app being under development.”
Once this is available, Midsummer will be in a position to offer it as an integrated electric home control system, and Jez predicts there will be more of this type of solution available. He says: “Samsung is working on a collaboration with Qcells to get that sort of functionality and other people will be coming at it from different directions too.”
The Homely smart thermostat works with any heat pump that will let it take control of the heat pump flow temperatures and compressor speed. “We’ll do that via Modbus, we’re working through the tech integration, but the algorithm doesn’t change. It’s just just making it talk to the right bits of kit and finding the right bits on the Modbus register for it to communicate.”
Simple energy solutions for the end-user
A big advantage of this is that the end-user won’t have to make any complicated decisions about using their energy. Jez says: “At the moment, people with a battery and a heat pump are having to make a decision before they go to bed every night about whether to force charge their battery or not. And if they get it wrong, then it costs them a bit of money. So the fantastic thing about this is that it just takes care of it all.” It even adjusts when a building does, for example if the fabric is improved. “One of the earlier adopters, a customer of ours, replaced all her windows and she found that within a week, all of temperatures adjusted down as the system learned the new characteristics of her house.”
It also makes the heat pump more straight forward for the installer. “It makes a pump a lot easier to commission because instead of having to go through and put in all the settings for the hot water and for the heating and sending out the weather compensation, you simply tell it when you want hot water and what temperature you want it to be and then it just takes care of everything. Even if the physical install is perfect if you commission it badly, it’s going to perform badly. So taking that headache off the installer and saying this is all automated will be better. It’s a winning proposition.”
More information available: midsummerwholesale.co.uk
