The energy-efficient home of Geert and Nadine in Dentergem

We are warmly welcomed by Geert and Nadine Desmet in Dentergem, West Flanders. Geert is a retired carpenter who, together with his wife Nadine, enjoys the peace and quiet and his grandchildren. They do this in the modern, energy-efficient house with lots of light that Geert built next to his old workshop.

"We had our first solar panels installed back in 2009. Since then, the installation has been extended twice more. As the icing on the cake, an AlphaESS SMILE 5 home battery was added to the installation about a year ago. This has increased our own consumption considerably and we have been able to optimise our energy consumption with very small changes.

What kind of surgery did you do?

I regularly check the AlphaCloud app to see how our how our energy consumption is doing at the moment. That way I quickly saw that we that it would be better if we switched on certain high-consumption devices at a different time, without sacrificing comfort. Nadine now makes sure that we run the dryer in the afternoon when the sun is shining. in the afternoon when the solar panels are producing well.

We don't need expensive automations for this. The app has given us this insight and we act accordingly.

Do you have a digital 'smart' meter?

Yeah. Thanks to the home battery, we don't have we're not at all worried about the new charging formula. At the moment I'm looking around for the best place to get a favourable contract with an energy supplier, so that I can still get something for the electricity we send to the grid. so I can still get something for the electricity we inject into the grid. to the grid.

The installation of the home battery and the digital meter have also had no effect at all on the green power certificates to which we are still entitled. The first inverters of our solar panel installation are of course already quite old, so it's reassuring to know that if one of these inverters should fail, the solar panels can be connected directly to the SMILE 5 inverter.