My name's Dino Musolino, we're in Virginia and we're growing hydroponic lettuce, and value adding our product. The story behind the business is that in 1997 we broke away from a broadacre arrangement that was part of the family business that my father started in 1955. In '97 I wanted to be a little bit more diverse than growing in the field, so I looked at getting into hydroponics. Our products are predominantly sold in South Australia and Victoria into independent grocery supermarkets, Foodlands, IGAs, FoodWorks, and independents.
So the scale of the business is where we continuously plant and harvest on a daily basis. So we're planting around 25,0000 to 30,000 individual seedlings on a weekly basis. We have 24-hour continuous pumping for our hydroponic arrangements. We also have cool rooms that are continuously running 24-hours, and we also have the processing operation that consumes a reasonable amount of power during those working hours. The operation has three facets to it. So it has a team that works in the hydroponic arrangement. It also has a team that works out on the broadacre where we're supplying product into our processing, and it has our processing arm as well, and we also have a DC in the Adelaide produce markets. So we have in total around 30 to 35 employees.
Oh look, on this single site for one particular metre, we have multiple metres here, but one of the particular metres where we've added additional solar, we were paying somewhere close to $9000 to $10,000 a month. The cost of a business like this for power is significant for the size of the operation that we are. By introducing the solar has certainly done two things. One, it's good for the environment. And two, it's saving us money. Okay now, our saving at the moment, we're looking at about four to $5,000 a month in savings. Predominantly, we use a lot more through the summer where we're getting more daylight hours which we're getting a benefit through the solar. We did have a smaller solar system in and we saw the advantages of going to the bigger system.
How did Hi Fresh Hydroponics in Adelaide utilise solar power to save $4000 a month in electricity costs?
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