Sarah: “I grew up in a house full of books, and reading has always been my passion. When my mother died I inherited my parents’ books, and the seeds of the bookshop were sown. I retired from my day job in 2016, with a plan already in place. The hatchery building came on the market at just the right time, and though we had to completely gut it and do a full renovation, five years later after much work and the trials of Covid, we were ready to open in May 2021”.
~1980
Building built and run as commercial trout hatchery
2010
Run on a seasonal basis by Shetland Anglers Association
2013
Fish hatchery closes
2014
Building bought by Sarah
2016
Planning work started on the building
2017
Plans submitted for bookshop
2020
Building work finished
2021
Bookshop opens
2022
Grant awarded from the Islands Communities Fund to install a wind turbine & a vehicle charging point
Ground Source Heating: We set out to have as low a carbon footprint as possible for the building and looked into different options. Water turbine or heat exchanger in the burn? Not viable due to low summer flow rates and water depth most years. Solar panels? Wouldn’t provide all our electricity needs. So we opted for ground source heating. Sub-soil ground source heating system which requires a metre of preferably wet soil? Not possible because the ground around the Hatchery is hard blue limestone with a thin cover of soil or clay. So the option was for ‘deep drill’ ground source heating. This involved drilling 4×16m holes down into the rock, to power what we know as our ‘upside down fridge’.
Technically, thermal transfer fluid (TTF), a mixture of water and antifreeze (sometimes known as ‘brine’) flows around a loop of pipe, buried in a long loop (called a ‘probe’) inserted into a borehole with a diameter of around 180mm. Heat from the ground is absorbed into the fluid, which then passes through a heat exchanger into the heat pump. This raises the temperature of the fluid and then transfers that heat to water. We installed underfloor heating that maintains a very comfortable and steady temperature throughout the bookshop.
Wind turbine: In 2022, we installed a 9m SD6 wind turbine: a 6kW small wind turbine designed for domestic, small commercial, and remote island use. It has 3 blades turning a diameter of 5.6m which rotate at a maximum 200 RPM, and has an annual energy production of up to 30,000 kWh depending on wind speed.
Because of the grant that we got to install it, and the savings we are making on our energy bills, it has made a big difference to our viability as a small start-up business emerging from Covid. In the month of February 2023, 74% of the electricity we used in the business was generated by the turbine. When it’s windy we export the surplus to the grid. Our thanks go to local firm Nordri for all their help and advice with the installation.
Green-roof: The hatchery building previously had a metal box profile roof, and we decided early on in the project that we wanted to create a ‘green’ living roof. We had to substantially reinforce the roof structure, install plywood sheeting, and then a living roof system supplied by Hertalan. This consists of a membrane layer, a moisture mat, a drainage and water retention layer and then top soil mixed with grit on which we sowed our seed.
The seeds we planted were a mix from Scotiaseeds of slow growing grasses and coastal wildflowers: a selection of salt and wind tolerant, annual, biennial and perennial wildflowers that enjoy open conditions on a well drained site. These included: Chewings Fescue, Crested Dog’s Tail, Common Bent, Meadow Foxtail, Campion, Primrose, Cowslip, Birdsfoot Trefoil, Scots Lovage, Lady’s Bedstraw, Vipers Bugloss, Clustered Bellflower, Thrift, Kidney Vetch, Yellow Rattle, Ox-Eyed Daisy, and Poppies. We can see that a range of these have grown over the three years since we planted them, and we are delighted with the result.