As Master Installers of the revolutionary SurfacePower fuel heating and hot water system to homes and businesses across Ireland and the UK, Roscommon-based Ecoflex Energy is an exciting new company with the potential to completely transform its customers’ lives.
We met up with founder John Freeman to find out more about this 100% transparent and proven system, which harnesses free energy from natural daylight to dramatically reduce energy bills.
SurfacePower HONE is the only all year around free fuel heating and hot water system. The system uses nanotechnology to harness free energy from photons of daylight, which is then used to heat (and cool) residential, commercial and industrial buildings and also to provide hot water.
SurfacePower HONE researches, designs and manufactures thermal energy systems that use daylight as their only energy source, offering the world a real alternative to oil and gas as well as a system that vastly outperforms heat pumps and solar hot water.
Nano science is at the heart of this system’s extraordinary performance. As HONE can collect energy from a broad light spectrum, it functions perfectly even when light levels are low – as is often the case in Ireland! Thus, customers can benefit from the system in both bright and dull weather, all day long throughout the year.
SurfacePower proves its performance with real time 24/7 metering and monitoring. They believe in proof and evidence, rather than claims. An online monitoring system allows customers and prospective customers to see for themselves what sort of savings are being made.
One of the real beauties of this system is that any building – regardless of age or size – can use SurfacePower daylight-powered heating – from family homes to nursing homes, hotels to factories, offices to hospitals.
So how does it work? HONE is essentially a hybrid heating system installed on a small part of the customer’s roof or wall to seamlessly integrate with the existing hot water and heating framework. It can be installed in new builds or retrofitted in any existing heating system.
Ecoflex Energy supplies and installs complete systems. Every installation is design-approved beforehand and the installation itself is quick and hassle-free. Within a day of two, the new hybrid system will be fully functional.
HONE produces over three times more energy per square metre than the best solar hot water panels and this fact is based on actual metered heat results under the UK Government RHI tariff program. This means that payback is more than three times faster and customers will get more than three times bigger tariff rebates per year. It also means you save more than three times the energy per year compared to the best solar thermal systems.
The HONE system is the only photon nanotechnology renewable heating (and cooling) technology in the world today. It delivers very high temperatures from free photonic energy, typically between 60C [140F] and 180C [356C] depending on the application.
Why would somebody opt to have SurfacePower HONE technology installed in their building(s)? For starters, a customer may have ever increasing bills running on old or outdated technology, e.g. electric air conditioning, or may be under pressure from customers to meet carbon reduction targets. Many enterprises, whether private or public sector, are more concerned about unsustainable raw energy costs into the future as well as additional CO2 costs which are passed through under different directives. Switching to renewable heating and cooling should be on everybody’s agenda.
Having fronted Ecoflex Surfacing for twenty years previously, John Freeman set up Ecoflex Energy in April, 2014. “SurfacePower is the international brand and we handle their distribution in Ireland and the UK,” he notes. “When we got the distribution rights for SurfacePower for Ireland, I established Ecoflex Energy as a standalone company to ensure that the system was installed exactly as it should be, by Master Installers.
“SurfacePower is a daylight thermal energy system which extracts energy from the daylight and this energy can then be used to heat or cool your home or business. The energy is gathered by collectors on your roof or wall and we are certified as having the highest-performing collectors in the world.
“In Ireland’s daylight, you have 1000kw hours of energy per square metre and our collectors are certified as being able to collect 783kw of that. Even though Ireland has the lowest levels of daylight in Europe, this system still performs brilliantly here.”
Once the system is installed, running costs are very low. Electricity costs associated with running the system are almost negligible and the coefficient of performance is extremely high. While the SurfacePower system won’t provide all your energy for heating and cooling, it will cover most of it:
“Ours is a daylight-powered boiler, which harnesses free energy from the daylight but the system uses hybrid technology,” the Roscommon man explains. “It needs to work as part of a hybrid system, alongside an oil or gas boiler. Our boiler will provide most of the heat while the oil or gas will serve as a back-up.”
One of the biggest challenges with any new concept or product is to get past people’s natural suspicions and prove that the system actually works. To this end, the SurfacePower system boasts a live online presence – something than not of its competitors are prepared to offer. Thus, performances levels are proven.
“When you bring something revolutionary to the market, people are always going to be sceptical and this is understandable. If something looks too good to be true, it usually is. But we have been building data for five years and we have put our system live online, where it can be remotely monitored and everybody has their own link to the usage data.
“The system also comes with a 20-year performance warranty and payback can be achieved within six to seven years, compared to 20 years for a standard solar thermal system.
“This is the only way to safeguard against the rising price of oil and to control how it will affect your home and your business. If you can decrease your oil usage by 70% and benefit from free heat, then you will make considerable savings.”
From his base in Frenchpark, Roscommon and with operational centres in Cork and Tipperary, John has installed SurfacePower technology all over the island of Ireland and in the UK. At present, Ecoflex Energy has systems live online in Galway, Dublin, Kildare, Belgium and the UK as well as a hospital in Belfast.
Ecoflex employs a full-time crew of six at present and John expects to increase that number in the foreseeable future, with twelve staff members projected by the end of the current calendar year. A fleet of three vans provides nationwide coverage and this will increase to four imminently.
“People have a huge problem trying to maintain control over their fuel bills and one of the ways to neutralise this is by reducing the cost of oil as much as possible,” John concludes. “While there is an upfront cost to having this system installed, typically people will be seeing a payback within six or seven years and they will benefit from free energy from there on.”
Ecoflex Energy Ltd.,
Sheepwalk,
Frenchpark,
County Roscommon.
LoCall: 1890 989 509
Email: [email protected]
