Throughout 2014, a family-owned farm in Cheshire used a unique hydrogen boiler (installed by a Bristol based company) that extracts energy from rain-water.

The trial is a joint exercise between Clean Power Solutions and Giacomini, the Italian inventors of the world’s first hydrogen burner.

Spring Bank Farm near Sandbach in Cheshire uses the rain-water-powered boiler to provide energy to run the house, the farm, a small on-site industrial unit that includes a micro-brewery and a separate guest house.

The system gathers renewable energy via a 48kW photo-voltaic solar panel network and a 20kW wind turbine; this is then converted to an AC current to meet the energy demands of the site.

Excess energy is then stored in a grid of batteries that have a number of uses, including powering the hydrogen electrolyser.

This can produce 2.2kg of hydrogen a day from collected rain-water. The gas is stored in the hydrogen tank, ready to be turned into thermal energy by the Giacomini burner; this is a condensation boiler based on an innovative catalytic hydrogen burner that is powered simply by gaseous hydrogen (the fuel) and atmospheric air (oxygen).

Inside the unit is a catalyser that allows the hydrogen and oxygen to combine spontaneously to form water, at the same time releasing a quantity of heat that is removed by a series of heat exchangers.

The manufacturers of this system say the success of this project is the first indication of a possible breaking of the stranglehold that the energy producers currently have over industrial, commercial and domestic users.