Light and Building hp BSEE Sep22.qxp_Layout 1 18/8/22 09:51 Page 1
INDUSTRY COMMENT
Raising the bar in boiler room safety
Pete Mills, commercial technical operations manager at Bosch Commercial & Industrial discusses why safety is paramount when it comes to heating
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2. – 6. 10. 2022 Frankfurt am Main
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tate of the Art is an important principle for manufacturers designing their products for safety in use. It is a term that will probably be familiar to most people but is not always well understood when it relates to products that we rely upon every day to meet our needs. In the heavily regulated world of gas boilers, where we have the overarching Gas Appliance Regulations, we might think everything is at its peak regarding safety in use, but inevitably things move on. Innovation keeps moving forward and with it the possibility to explore new options and applications that may have seemed out of practical reach a few years ago. As products become established in the market, due to economies of scale costs reduce significantly to a point where they become affordable. We think that you can’t put a price on safety, but inevitably the cost benefit ratio must be balanced if we want affordable products that all can benefit from. At Bosch we have reached this point with Carbon Monoxide (CO) detection for higher risk scenarios involving multiple boilers and combined cascade flue headers. Reliable CO detection equipment has become more available with a wider range of applications. We know from the high-profile CO awareness campaigns run by Gas Safe and other organisations, that CO poisoning is one of the most significant risks in our homes and places of work and leisure. Across Europe as a whole, around 16,000 people die from CO poisoning every year, which is more than succumb to skin cancer. Thankfully only a small proportion around 3% are attributed to gas heating appliances, but this still represents a large number of avoidable fatalities. No wonder then that CO poisoning has been dubbed the Silent Killer. In the UK around 30 accidental fatalities attributed to CO poisoning occur every year. We believe the time has come to mandate CO detection equipment for higher risk scenarios such as combined flue systems commonly found in boiler rooms across the UK. Cascaded appliances have become very popular over the last decade because of their flexibility to be used in multiple applications and ease of installation. This has inevitably increased the number of cascade flue systems used each year.
32 BUILDING SERVICES & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEER SEPTEMBER 2022
CO detection equipment has evolved to the point where 10-year service life can be expected, meaning intervention is minimal and the effectiveness of an elevated CO level being picked up and not being missed by non-maintained equipment has significantly improved. But alarms alone are not enough to mitigate the risk, which is why Bosch has decided to make it mandatory for cascade flue systems to incorporate CO detection with boiler interlock. This means if CO levels above 50ppm are detected, an alarm will sound but also the boiler interlock will be triggered safely shutting down the gas boilers. We have begun to supply CO detectors as standard with cascade flue systems and have updated our manufacturer’s instructions to mandate the installation and use of this equipment. We will also require CO detection for use with third party cascade flue systems that might be used with Bosch boilers. Of course, there are some situations where CO detection with interlocks is already in use connected to Building Management Systems (BMS) and these are perfectly acceptable as long as they have a similar detection threshold no greater than 50ppm. Educational establishments for example, will commonly have situations that already require CO detection under IGE/UP/11. In designing products for safety, all manufacturers must decide whether their products reflect the state of the art that exists at that time and keep the situation under review. Making unilateral decisions to increase the level of safety as the state of the art moves forward is never an easy call, especially when there is some extra work for installers. Bosch has never shied away from these decisions, and we already exceed current standards in a number of other safety related areas for gas boilers. We hope that by making this move we will prompt the wider industry to adopt CO detection under these circumstances as the norm and thereby raise the bar in boiler room safety. We feel this step will be significant
in providing a leap forward in boiler room safety for an area of flue assembly that has increased massively in the last decade. It will provide additional protection for the installer and consumer during the transition period to low carbon and finally zero carbon gas.
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