March 1, 2024 Innasol Partner Profiles

Q&A with Neil Palmer At Border Eco Systems

Neil Palmer has been the Managing Director of Border Eco Systems, based in Jedburgh, since 2009. He’s seen bioenergy grow significantly in the UK over the past decade and a half, so we sat down to talk with him about what has changed in that time, some memorable projects, and people’s surprising motivations for switching to bioenergy.

How did you end up working in Bioenergy Boilers?

The simple answer is, I don’t know.

I was working for my family’s development business and we had a site where we couldn’t get oil or LPG because we couldn’t find the space for tanks.

It was a development of 9 new houses, 5 of which were renovations, so, we spent a lot of 2008 looking into the different options to heat them all. We eventually decided to install a bioenergy boiler.

After a lot of research, we chose ETA boilers because they ticked all the boxes – and their technical support was very good, too.

So, we installed the boiler, got it up and running, and business grew from there via word-of-mouth. In 2009, we set up Border Eco Systems, which specialised solely in bioenergy.

You said that ETA ticked all the boxes – what do you mean by that?

We spent about 6-9 months looking at different boiler manufacturers all over Europe, as there weren’t really any in the UK.

ETA seemed to offer a fuller range than other manufacturers, and when we first started, the old-style control panel was common. When we visited ETA for the first time, we saw the new touch-screen version, which was a game-changer for the control and building management side of things.

ETA still leads by a long way in that.

Is that because of the remote-control capabilities?

That, and the way you can customise settings to an individual property or a group of properties.

It’s very broad in what you can control, and if you can get that remotely and online as an installer network, we can do a lot of diagnosis and fault-finding before we even go to the site, so it’s probably our most-used tool in our toolbox.

What other boxes did they tick?

They were able to produce a wide range of boilers – anything from a 7kW to a 200-250kW, which is up to 500kW now, and they have a good selection of log, pellet and chip boilers.

A lot of other manufacturers had one or two models in each range, but ETA had a vast selection, so you could pick exactly the right boiler for the installation.

Is most of your time spent on servicing boilers?

Yes, it is now.

The majority of our work used to be quoting and installation, and we still do some of that, but we mainly do servicing, maintenance and repairs now.

With the new approval scheme, we’re also picking up a lot of new customers, which is interesting as we quoted installation work for a number of them 10-12 years ago, but we’ve picked up their servicing work now as their installers have disappeared.

How have changing regulations and incentives like RHI disappearing impacted your work?

It’s a very different situation from how it was when schemes like RHI were active.

A lot of people are still interested in bioenergy, particularly this year after the energy crisis, but there are two barriers to bioenergy still: capital cost and space for installation.

The fact that there’s no longer a renewable heating incentive has hampered how many new installs are going in, but people are looking at different options for heating now, more so than before.

We’re seeing an increase in interest in the domestic market, and certainly in the commercial market, too, as they’re getting hammered by big bills.

I think the government need to have an incentive behind bioenergy – we do have interest-free loans for bioenergy through the energy saving trust, but it’s a long way short of where it needs to be. However, I think it will come in time.

Are there any particularly memorable installations you can tell us about?

We’ve done quite a lot of installations, from little farm cottages to castles.

I prefer installing the bigger boiler systems: we did one up at Thirlestane Castle, which was very successful.

We also installed one with an individual who had two wind turbines, so we connected a big accumulator tank with immersions to dump the power, but he later realised that you get quite a lot of cold days with no wind, so we went back to fit a log boiler, which essentially made him self-sufficient.

More recently we’ve had commercial boiler replacement scheme installations, where we take out a broken or burst boiler and refit an ETA. One owner reckoned that he was saving 14-16 hours a week not working on a faulty boiler, and when he called us asking what he needed to do, we told him he didn’t need to do anything apart from keep the chip store full.

Do you find there are a lot of cases where you need to be creative with the solution?

Actually, it’s normally very straightforward, but there’s more and more people wanting to go off-grid. A lot of our customers are rural – most of them don’t have a mobile phone signal, never mind anything else.

That being said, getting the systems to work to our customer’s needs is certainly easier with ETA’s controls.

Ten years ago, you had a different control panel for each system, but now, most of them can be integrated into the ETA controls, and ETA controls the whole system.

How often do you come across ‘nightmare’ installations when you’re replacing a customer’s boiler?

We’re starting to come across them more often, and because of the new service requirements and regulations, a lot of original manufacturers are gone, so getting training to service them is very difficult.

To their credit, they were pioneers trying new things, and we have a lot more knowledge now than we did 15 years ago, when nobody was talking about bioenergy at all.

When talking to people about new installations, what are they motivated by?

Half of them are motivated by financial incentives, half are motivated by self-sufficiency or eco-consciousness.

If you get a log boiler, you don’t have to worry about anyone else – you just have to like chopping sticks.

Being in a rural area, over half of our customers feed their own boilers with their own timber, but some of our semi-rural and commercial clients opt for pellets as an easier option.

How much do you have to educate people you supply boilers to?

For new enquiries, quite a lot, but in the early days, it was most of the time.

Nowadays, people are a lot more educated. They will often come to us with ideas about what they want, and we’ll just have to guide them to a better solution they might not have thought of.

Your main clients are off-grid, but do you have clients who could potentially access gas who choose to install bioenergy instead?

There are quite a few clients, especially commercial, who are looking to get away from gas. These are often big users, such as hotels and factories.

This is either because energy costs have gone sky-high, or because they can go carbon neutral.

We had a case in Nottingham where we installed a pellet boiler for a customer who also had solar PV in the roof, and when he pitched his new product to a client, his factory won their business because he could classify it as a ‘green’ product.

So, it’s amazing how far the benefits can go.

Lastly, how has being part of the Innasol network helped?

It’s been massively helpful.

In terms of technical support, it’s great to be able to speak to people in the UK, and we have local partners who have knowledge of the product, too. The portal system for ordering parts is intuitive, and both Innasol and ETA are great at getting them to you quickly.

In fact, if you need a person to visit your site for a project or a meeting, they’re good at that, too.

All in all, Innasol and ETA are great to work with.

Innasol is the UK’s sole distributor of ETA bioenergy boilers, the leading national brand for bioenergy heating systems with wood chip, wood pellets, or log fuel. 

If you would like to find out about joining the Innasol partner network and becoming an accredited installer of ETA boilers and bioenergy heating systems, contact us to learn more. 

If you want to remove fossil fuels from your heating and you’d like to find out if bioenergy boilers could be a fit for your home or business, or call 01621 892613 to speak to one of the accredited installers from our nationwide network. 

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