Social housing supplement Technology and skills
Black Country Housing Group has been building energy effi cient social housing since the early 1990s.
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most effi cient device was the CHP unit, even though we had to run it at 50 per cent load because we had not built all the houses. The heat pump, however, was only cost effective for heating provided we only ran it overnight on cheap-rate electricity. The CHP was better still because it was giving us ‘free’ electricity as well as effi cient heat. But there were problems, the biggest one being
“If I could have one wish for the building services industry, it would be a single qualifi cation route for multi-skilled technicians”
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CIBSE Journal June 2010
a complete lack of knowledge, skill and expertise in running the CHP in such a complex arrangement. It was completely impractical to rely on an engineer based in the south of England and it took us 10 years to find a local company, called Energized Limited, which could deal with the system. Five years later, we still only have one company that can cope with it. I am afraid this experience highlights the major skills and qualifications issue that still haunts the building services sector today. Unlike most other building services engineering firms, Energized employs engineers who hold multiple qualifi cations in gas, electrical and pressurised systems. Where their competitors have to send us three engineers, Energized only needs to send one. Why is this? One reason is the high cost of obtaining
professional certification in so many disciplines. I believe the situation has its roots in the demarcation driven by the trades back in the 1960s. The professional bodies, each vying for membership and fees, may well claim that the root cause is specialisation, but I would disagree. We have found one service provider that has all the specialisms, proving that it can be done.
If I could have one wish for the building services
industry, it would be a single qualifi cation route for multi-skilled technicians. I want to be able to ring up what used to be my plumber and get my water-cooled PV array mended for the cost of the parts and a couple of hours labour, without having to pay towards the plumbers’ on-costs of being a member of half a dozen disparate professional bodies, none of which actually relate to the job in hand. Our work to improve the energy effi ciency of existing
stock has also revealed technological challenges that still need to be overcome. In 2001, together with Dudley Metropolitan Borough
Council, we refurbished 22 solid-walled, inter-war, semi-detached properties on Norwood Road in Brierley Hill, in the borough of Dudley. We upgraded the fabric insulation and replaced failed window frames and render. The absence of basements and the scattering of houses along the street meant that a district heating main was both physically and economically impractical. We had to look for an alternative heat source, small enough to deal with the minute heating load while remaining efficient. Unfortunately there isn’t one. The closest we got was a large (7kW) water heater that had suffi cient capacity to heat the minimum of three radiators that the tenant consultation called for. We had tried to persuade the tenants that their existing, modern and enclosed, 4.5kW gas fi res were more than adequate, but central heating has become a ‘must have’ in any social housing refurbishment, along with double glazing.
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