From the ages of four and five, Iain & Andy Howley were no strangers to drilling sites. Watching their grandfather and father drilling boreholes drilling was very much in their blood.
With a small bank loan secured, Iain & Andy rented a drilling rig from their father and they continued to drill wells under his watchful eye eventually generating enough money to buy the equipment outright. In the early 1990’s, Andy paid a visit to the National Groundwater Exhibition in the USA where a section of the show focussed on Ground Source Heat Pumps. Iain & Andy began to look into the new technology and found it was well established in the USA, Canada, Scandinavia and other parts of Europe – why not the UK?

From the early 90’s onwards, Iain and Andy spent time educating and preaching to traditional mainstay building services engineers about the merits of geothermal technology.
The real break came in 1995 when a forward-thinking engineer decided to use a well to heat and cool a new building for a computer software producer in Twycross, Leicestershire. Iain and Andy’s company Mercia Drilling Ltd was commissioned to drill their first geothermal well. The project was a huge success and GSHP work starting flowing in.
In 1997 they installed the GSHP in the high profile Sadler’s Wells Theatre London, ....their reputation as the specialist geothermal drilling was established.

Mercia Drilling Ltd was bought outright by Raeburn Drilling Ltd in April of 2002. Continued success followed and Andy and Iain decided to use and build on their expertise so set up a consultancy. In January 2005, LoopMaster (Europe) Ltd was born and the office was Andrew’s dining room! The business thrived and then the boys got a helping hand from an unlikely source. Enter Ken Livingstone – Mayor of London……..

Ken Livingstone is a huge advocate of tackling climate change. He introduced a planning regulation known as Part L that meant that any building over a certain size had to have a minimum of 10% of the developments overall energy demand supplied from a renewable source. In London and most inland areas, wind turbines are impractical, photovoltaic cells can only achieve a tiny percentage and are costly with long pay back terms, the calculations whichever way you look at them show that a ground source heat pump system would do the whole 10% and more sometimes in one fell swoop.

The LoopMaster team was now in demand.