Helmet under Antoine Post has been warm last winter. While his friends were rattling their teeth with the thermostat set to 17 and had to pay a hefty amount for energy, his new home with a smart energy system worked wonders. The final bill: 15 euros per month.
Antoine received a lot of attention a year and a half ago when he had an enormous water tank installed under the new house in the Helmond district of Brandevoort. Content: one hundred thousand litres. The tank is part of an energy-efficient home that the former student of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) is developing together with his colleagues.
It was very questionable how well the water tank would do during the winter. But now that the house is once again bathed in the first rays of the sun in March, Antoine is sure: the system with the underground water tank works very well.
In the summer, the heat from the sun enters the house through solar panels and solar collectors. This heats up the water in the tank and that heat is used again in the winter.
“It’s actually a huge thermos under the house,” says Antoine. According to him, the water in the tank had warmed up to 60 degrees at the end of summer last year. It turned out to be enough to warm his house in the winter. The temperature in the tank is now 13 degrees. It’s time for the sun to do its job again.
“The system has a long payback period.”
It all sounds very simple, but according to Antoine it is not. “The system is actually a very complicated battery. Our meter cupboard was already complicated and has now become even more complicated.” The ambition of Antoine and his colleagues is to make the system suitable for the regular housing market. “Wherever we want to go is that every installer can install it.”
Antoine says he gets a lot of phone calls and e-mails from people who are also interested in his system. People even ring the doorbell at his smart home.
But for private homeowners it will not be easy to achieve. “The system has a long payback period. It only works optimally if you can share it. We mainly focus on housing corporations or large construction companies. They can set up collective systems and deal with the fact that something only pays for itself in thirty years.”
“How can we make the system so that residents can get the most out of it?”
Antoine’s house consists of three apartments, which are connected to the system. According to Antoine, the team is ready for the next step, building 42 apartments, where regular tenants will also move in. “Our question now is, how can we make the system in such a way that you as a resident can get everything out of it, without having to turn a hundred buttons?”
According to Antoine, he doesn’t have to spend much time on it either. About an hour a week. “And that’s because we want to be busy with it, but you can also leave it alone. We just went on vacation.”
Unfortunately, the heat pump broke down. “But we don’t immediately need a technician, because we have the heat from the tank. Other people with a broken heat pump are immediately left out in the cold. We could say to the mechanic, come next week. That was nice.”
In 2021, Omroep Brabant visited Antoine. His house was still under construction at the time.
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