October 17, 2024 North Wales Biomass

Q&A with Tom Brereton of North Wales Biomass

Tom Brereton is the Director of North Wales Biomass. We spoke to him about getting into the family heating and plumbing business, why he chose to pursue bioenergy heating, and what life was like for a biomass professional post-RHI.

How did you get into heating?

My dad was a heating engineer. I went into it when I left high school in 2008. I’m a fifth-generation plumber, so I was always going to go into it.

I did think along the way, that maybe it wasn’t for me. I think if I hadn’t gone into biomass I would definitely have found something else, because I just wasn’t enjoying working on household stuff like bathrooms. There’s also a college just down the road from where I used to live, and that churns our plumbers and heating engineers every year. It’s a very saturated market.

When biomass came up as an opportunity, my dad was coming to the end of his career. He wasn’t really interested in learning new things — he just wanted to finish his career, but he said, ‘If you want to pursue biomass, by all means do that. It’s your baby.’

How did biomass present itself as an opportunity?

I used to do work for a local property developer. Back in the RHI days, he used to sell biomass installations. I don’t think he really knew what he was selling, and he needed a plumber to install them.

My dad and I did all the plumbing for his properties, so he got us to do the biomass boilers too.
After the RHI scheme ended the installations dwindled, but there were still services and repairs to do. That’s how I got my foot in the door and my name out there.

I was 13 when the RHI scheme started, so I was too young to take advantage of it, but there were a lot of installers who did a very poor job. I built my business initially on repairing those installs, but new installations are starting to pick up.

And with those new installations, do you find people are motivated by money, environmentalism, or a bit of both?

A lot of my customers are businesses, and right now I think the price per kWh for bioenergy is about half that of oil. I’ve got customers with huge heating requirements who have saved £20,000 a year on heating. Any business that can save that kind of money is going to jump at the chance.

With that though, everyone knows they need to move away from fossil fuels, and most people want to do that, not just because it’s cheaper. Obviously, because biomass is so much cheaper than oil, it makes that switch so much easier to make.

Why ETA boilers?

As I said, I was running a business based on repairing the poor jobs that people had done during the RHI years. There were some shocking installations. People must have made an absolute fortune by selling the dream, then installing awful boilers, and installing them badly. It was giving biomass a really bad name.

I was looking to build a relationship with a brand, but none of them I found offered proper support — there was no technical backup or proper training.

One day someone had asked me to service a boiler at a National Trust site in Snowdonia. It was an ETA. I didn’t know one of the codes that the software was displaying so I called ETA and asked them about it. They told me that they wouldn’t discuss it with me because I hadn’t had their training. To be honest, I was annoyed at the time, but that was the sign that they were doing it right and they were committed to the training in a way that other brands weren’t.

So I decided to get the training. I called Innasol, I did my training, and they actually kickstarted it by passing me a couple of leads, both converted.

Innasol and ETA

I’ve been with them just shy of two years now, and I’m pretty flat out with servicing and installations.

With boilers themselves, I could put an ETA boiler next to another brand and even if you have no engineering background you can tell that the ETA is the better one. It’s like comparing a Dacia Sandero with an Audi A4. It’s the hands down the best mechanically. Aesthetically too — I have an Instagram account and I post my installations and even people who have no background or interest in boilers message me saying how nice they look.

If I’d started my biomass career with ETA, I would have saved myself a lot of stress and headaches.

Innasol is the UK’s sole distributor of ETA biomass boilers, the leading national brand for biomass heating systems with wood chip, wood pellet, 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 biomass heating systems, contact us to learn more. here.

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