HIUS & DISTRICT HEATING
www.heatingandventilating.net
Let’s do district heating better
District heating schemes have always been viewed as one of the most efficient solutions in domestic heating. They’re being installed because in theory they’re better. But is installing the system enough, or do we need to do more to make them efficient? Bill Bates, director of Energy Billing, explores the effectiveness of these schemes
Bill Bates
If we, as an industry, tolerate these levels, how can we expect governments, housing associations, and public and private landlords to continue to install district and communal heating systems? All in all, we are sowing the seeds of our own destruction.
Change
Knowing what is happening leaves us with two questions: 1) how do we improve the systems already in place? and 2) how do we educate designers, installers and operators on the best approach to running schemes so they will support our industry going into the future?
I think the only solution will be for us, as an industry, to stop looking at the individual elements and instead treat the three key parts of a District Heating scheme together i.e. the energy centre (boiler house configuration), energy transfer (primary pipeworks), and the energy delivery (e.g. Heat Interface Units (HIUs) and radiators).
Monitoring T
he district heating industry in the UK has been around for 20 to 30 years. It’s something I’ve personally seen develop over time as I was involved with some of the largest schemes in the country over 25 years ago. I’ve also seen that it’s only been in the last 10 years that district heating schemes have really exploded onto the market. This is mainly due to a response to the RHI Initiative (Renewable Heat Incentive). This government incentive aimed to promote the use of renewable heat, encouraging people to switch to heating systems that use suitable energy sources in a bid to reduce carbon emissions. On paper, district heating seems like the ideal solution for this and it’s obvious to see why the RHI boosted the use of such schemes. But, as so often in life, the theory has ended up being far different to reality. We know that both anecdotally and through on site experience many of the recent district heating schemes are running at less than 50% of efficiency.
!" April 2020
Each of these three key elements needs to be monitored. Let’s first consider the boiler house. Are we reading the gas meter or do we know the biomass fuel consumption in relation to the energy produced in the boiler house?
Is the boiler strategy the most efficient and does it
lengthen the life of those boilers? What are the pumps doing? What is the pressure in the system? Moving to the primary transmission system, has the pipework been sized correctly? Is it maintained and kept clean? Above all, how well insulated is it? Do we know if there are leaks?
For HIUs, many of them out there currently can’t be monitored, and they’re only given a cursory maintenance once a year (if they’re lucky). I wonder how this differs to the recommended maintenance schedule provided by the manufacturer? You wouldn’t expect a car to run on two cylinders, but that’s what we seem to expect for many district heating schemes.
Inefficiencies
I bet that for many schemes, there are no answers to most of the above questions. Things aren’t monitored and maintained and that is a huge flaw in how these systems operate.
Ultimately, the system’s inefficiencies come from the fact that we as people don’t work with them efficiently enough. The technology is there, but we need to be using it better. We need a more holistic view rather than focusing on so many elements in isolation, or worse, forgetting about it once it’s been installed.
After all, an F1 engine is the most efficient engine on the planet. However, at best it lasts about three races, and it is constantly being monitored for its performance.
What further adds to these problems is that, as I’ve seen in my experience, many of these schemes are handed over to landlords of housing associations that initially have little or no tech skills to effectively understand and maintain these systems. They’re often thrown in at the deep end and have a baptism of fire.
You wouldn’t expect an accountant to be asked to maintain someone’s website. We give people the jobs they’re trained to do, and if they’re not up to speed, then we should make sure they’re sufficiently trained.
Come together
I think that those who will succeed in this industry are those who will come together to provide an overall solution, rather than the fragmented, often overlooked systems that are currently in existence. It will only be when we are able to go to clients with robust, manageable and easy to understand solutions that we’ll be able to successfully move forward and reach the true efficiencies that these products are capable of.
It has always been my feeling that this isn’t rocket science. We are just essentially heating water and distributing it. We just need to do it better.
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