While a lot of homes are struggling to pay their electricity bills, Tim Mourik, a 36-year-old Dutchman, does not pay a euro. “Since October, we have been officially energy neutral. I have installed everything myself in recent years, ”he confided in the columns of HLN.
Tim’s installations contain a heat pump, a solar water heater and approximately 35 solar panels. And it won’t have been extremely expensive for Tim and his family, since he installed everything himself. “Out of pure interest, as a hobby,” says the 30-something. “It started a few years ago in our old house, I thought ‘solar panels, that’s an interesting idea’, and then I installed them,” explains Tim.
If it costs him nothing in energy bills today, he will still have had to invest a lot of money in his installations: “I think that we spent around 12,000 euros in all. And that’s without the hours of work needed to install everything.
“I’m very happy to have made this choice years ago,” says Tim. “As an IT professional, I’ve always been interested in everything related to computing and technology. If you are a bit of a handyman, you can do a lot of things yourself,” adds the Dutchman.
Especially in the context of the current crisis, Tim can only be satisfied with the work accomplished. “I look ten, twenty years ahead and it’s also very nice to be rid of these fixed monthly costs. I’m already thinking about how I can store and use as much of our own generated energy as possible,” Tim further explains. “With current energy prices, we as a family of four are saving around 700 euros per month on energy,” he adds.