The family now relies on geothermal energy as an alternative to fossil fuels. ‘To exploit this natural energy, we buried 500 metres of piping below the frost line in our garden and now extract heat from the soil with a heat pump’, explains Arnd Peiffer. The softly purring pump delivers enough energy to cover the family’s hot water needs and run the underfloor heating. Clean power for the house is generated by the high-performance photovoltaic system installed on the roof and is fed directly into an electricity storage unit.
This back-up system ensures that the solar power is always available on demand, even when the sun is not shining. For the family man from Lower Saxony, the costs involved also made the decision to supply the energy for his home from renewable sources very easy: ‘I can count the costs, so it was never a purely idealistic decision. Today, my monthly energy bills are only half of what they were.’ Arnd Peiffer shows the current status of his home systems on his smartphone. The smart ControlApp ViCare on his phone enables the athlete to remotely control the heating system when he’s not at home – for instance, to save energy or heat the rooms to a comfortable temperature for when he gets back.