Helping Residents find out information on how they can improve their home's
energy efficiency Somerset Council is working towards carbon neutrality by 2030 and signposting information to the community about how they can also decarbonise and upgrade their homes by improving energy efficiency. Homeowners are eligible for up to £7,500 grant (or £9,000 if using heating oil to install heat pumps or other decarbonised energy efficient heating systems to replace the use of fossil fuels. But how to know if your home is
suitable for a heat pump and where to find a local installer? Thermly is helping Somerset residents to support heat pump adoption Thermly (www.thermly.co.uk) is an independent green tech start up and Certified B Corporation focused on helping homeowners make informed, confident choices about green energy technologies like heat pumps, solar panels, and batteries. Thermly joined forces with Retrofit Somerset in 2024, in a long-term collaboration for the region, including
Somerset Council, supporting the installation of heat pumps into homes. Thermly is an FCA licenced credit broker and works in partnership with Somerset based Lendology CIC to provide finance options - subject to eligibility - that can help spread the
upfront installation cost over time (www.thermly.co.uk/finance).
Matt's heat pump installation A recent example is Frome homeowner, Matt, who has had solar panels on his house since 2021. For him, going fully electric and adding an air source heat pump to his home
system was the logical next step. Matt says: "Working with Thermly was simple, straightforward and really handy. I wasn't sure which company to choose for installing an air source heat pump, but the Thermly platform helped me decide. I also really appreciated being connected to the relevant grants which saved
me £7,500 on the installation." "Living with the heat pump has been a real revelation - our home is much warmer and more cosy. The radiators maintain a steady, pleasant warmth, and I really like our new hot water system. When we were on gas, turning on the tap would start the noisy boiler and I would see the exhaust plume, reminding me that we were burning gas for heat with all its negative implications. Now, we have a large water tank full of piping hot water and I don't
feel guilty singing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in full in the shower!" "Given the current state of the world and volatile energy prices, 1 am very relieved that we no longer need to use gas to heat our home. And the cherry on top is attaching our new
heating system to our solar panels.
Even in winter, on a sunny day, our solar panels cover most of the energy required to keep our home warm. So not only have we got our home off fossil fuels; we are also heating it for free once we have paid off the panels." I feel happy that our home is well set up for some of the challenges that lie ahead - to me
this feels like a much better investment than a "high" interest ISA."
Petanque
We are happy to announce we have received funding for a village pétanque court from SALC Somerset Association of Local Councils for which we are enormously grateful.
The court will be built in the space in front of the skittle alley adjacent to the village hall with the kind permission of the owner Charles Doble.
A small group of volunteers will begin work over the coming weeks.
It is hoped that it will not only be a place to play pétanque but an outdoor meeting area with benches etc to be enjoyed by all.
We will update you with images of the construction once underway.
Ultrafast Broadband Update
If you passed by Appley Cross and the Primary School after Easter, it probably looked slightly chaotic... to be completely honest it was, with three different contractors all working within the school site, all with slightly different aims and deadlines... hopefully the school will soon have a nice new playground surface and all the different "fluids" will all head in the correct direction!
From our perspective this period was successful: our Fibre Cabinet is now live and we have ducts out of the school site in every direction needed. The school is now benefiting from Ultrafast Broadband from us, as are the Shop and nearby houses. The only damper is we don’t yet have a link across to our network in Appley at Frogs... more on this shortly.
We sometimes see customers’ devices struggling to hit their Fibre package speed once connected, often this is down to the age of the device (slower networking chip, processor capacity, or software), wifi capabilities or range. When I connected the school I found my own laptop’s limit, mainly due to the USB-C throughput. Fortunately, the limit in question was 3086Mbps download and 1287Mbps upload!
For some real-world perspective I streamed some 4k Netflix, while also joining a Teams meeting with some colleagues, all the while my actual bandwidth usage remained comfortably within our Basic Home parameters of 40Mbps - so even with 100x that available, day to day usage doesn’t use it.
Check before you dig!
Just before 9:30 am on Thursday 23rd, I suspect half of the readership were cursing Technological, as you all were met with the Red Alarm light of Misery and No Internet... A digger driver had met our Fibre Duct outside Waterrow severing the service to Clayhanger, Bathealton, Appley, Kittisford and Stawley. These types of incident are fortunately rare, but they do happen from time to time (the last widespread incidents were Aug. 2025, and Dec. 2023 both resolved within four hours and nine hours). On this occasion, our team was not far away to carry out an assessment of the damage and a restoration plan. Unfortunately, the repair was protracted with a number of complications, but all customers were successfully restored by 3:30 pm.
These things happen, but if you have our fibre across your land, please just contact us before you start work, we'll always be able to come and either mark the location or dig down to expose the duct for you. If you own a digger, please always use safe dig protocols, don’t use mechanical excavation within one metre of live fibre, and never use teeth near utilities. If accidents happen, please let us know, even if it looks undamaged, it could save a lot of disruption in future. Thank you for your patience and understanding when things go wrong, but we'll always aim to restore as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Our network design generally operates in rings: this provides two benefits, firstly it reduces the number of ducts that exclusively carry large number of customers’ traffic, and secondly if there is major damage, we can reroute services while repairs are carried out. Installing our Fibre Cabinet at Appley will add to this ring topography, with customers in the local areas being primarily fed from this location, but with three upstream connections back to our London Datacentre. Had we been able to complete the link from Appley Cross to Frogs Farmhouse, none of you would have lost service during this incident, as the damaged section would have been part of the ring. Finding a solution to the access issue at Appley Cross is our Number One priority and we have an outline plan and have made a substantial capital investment to facilitate this.
After our update in the last month, a number of you asked about Ashbrittle. Apologies for missing you out, you are very much in our plans and we have received a lot of positive expressions of interest in Ashbrittle itself. Our plan remains to reach you during the year, however the timescales are hard to predict; Firstly, while Ashbrittle had positive interest, we've not been getting any response from the farms surrounding Ashbrittle to the north and North West, particularly from Clayhanger to Stawley Mill. Alternatively, we would need to identify a River Tone crossing with amenable land owners on both banks and Environment Agency consent. Hopefully by the next issue, we have more positive news on timescales for Ashbrittle and the other areas in build.
Jim Weir, Technological