Get started on your journey to Net Zero with this online Decarbonisation Quick Wins Masterclass. The session will equip you with ideas for decarbonising your business, including no-cost and low-cost options, up to £5,000. You will also learn about renewable energy options for your business premises, including how they work and their pros and cons. (3 hours)
You can watch back a recent session here, or search our events page for upcoming Net Zero webinars and masterclasses by clicking here – https://teesvalley-ca.gov.uk/business/events/?_business_event_category=net-zero
Part of Tees Valley Net Zero
Tees Valley Net Zero has everything your business needs to develop a Net Zero strategy. Get fully funded consultancy support and up to £2,000 grant funding for your business, alongside easy access to online tools and regular webinars and workshops. If your business is based in Tees Valley (Darlington, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Redcar & Cleveland and Stockton-On-Tees), support is fully funded by the UK Government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. Find out more here: www.teesvalley-ca.gov.uk/net-zero-support
Tees Valley Net Zero is delivered by Decerna on behalf of the Tees Valley Mayor and Combined Authority.
Hello everyone um thanks for joining us this in this uh DEC composition master class this this Workshop is a part of a series of webinars training sessions and in person events that we run regularly as one of the services that we provide for businesses um and uh I’m hoping that you
Have uh given the the greetings and the some description about the nna in the bre breakout rooms but uh generally in at Thea uh we provide a wide range of services that you need to plan design and Implement your decarbonization strategies we also developed recently a online tool by uh which you can
Calculate and report your carbon emissions and generate the CRPS which is needed for future trades in the UK and we offer um free access to some eligible uh companies um so uh just to uh please do check online our website or uh if you are from
The uh uh T Valley region uh you can also check online the T Valley combin Authority website for more information and do not hesitate to get in touch with one of us um for for any queries that you you need uh so um a little bit about
Myself I’m Mo I’m a senior uh sustainability engineer at Thea and today with me is also Phil who is the head of erss uh group atna where we do all sort of Technical and strategic consultancy as well as uh Renewables and energy storage system developments
Um also we have Helen here uh which is the organizer and the manager of this session uh is our business development manager and who will be in reach during uh and after this session to help you uh with any queries or if you require any support with uh with the registration or
Our services just before starting off uh please note that this session will be recorded for our uh archive and uh uh future references and also slides will be available uh um uh slides will be available for uh for you after the session okay so let’s start off here uh is a
Timetable of the program today uh we start off uh with the introduction of some of the main principles and the definitions that we all need to understand before we start our zero journey and then uh we also provide the uh very first steps to start the Journey
For example what to uh what data you need to collect where to collect it from and uh what to pay attention to uh then we go to the quick FS which are basically the some straightforward measures and interventions which can be quickly implemented mostly with um low cost or
No cost uh to improve the Energy Efficiency and performance of your businesses and uh we continue with the second part of the quick beings after a short break at around 11 uh and we introduce some Renewables and new technologies if you want to go further in your Net Zero Journey um put some
More effort and investments in that uh then we will have 15 minutes of Q&A uh at the end of the session then you can ask your questions and bring up uh even some topics with spoke to your businesses but in the meantime please feel free to to use the chat function uh
To to ask your comment uh questions or add any comments and we’ll try to pick them up uh after uh after each section or um at the end of the um the master class uh at the end of this session we expect uh to leave you with a general
Understanding of Net Zero what does it mean what are the national uh targets what are uh how how does it relate to to you and your businesses and why it matters uh and then we touch uh on some Basic Energy evaluations and audits that
You you can do uh on your PES to find major gaps and uh Improvement opportunities within your business and also you’ll also have a handful of ideas and information to improve the Energy Efficiency and environmental performance of your company which you can just prioritize based on your uh business
Demands and features uh and start your decarbonization journey uh also we will uh give a chance to discuss some of the issues troubles that you have uh encountered within your business at end of the session so um let’s start with some introduction hopefully by now everyone is aware of uh
The impact we are all having on the global environment and uh climate change and the the the emergency that um uh we need to tackle it uh this is mostly the effect of uh Greenhouse uh gas emissions we call it the ghgs mostly carbon dioxide that we generate from fossil fuel combustion in
Our industrial processes in in uh transportation in agriculture in deforestation and um so on so uh this graph um shows how ghg emissions over the last century has steeply um rised from around Second Industrial Revolution at around uh 1850 a constant grow of emissions uh due to mass production using uh electric
Energy um has emerged but starting from the third uh Industrial Revolution from 1970s when the uh we we saw the you know the revolution of IT services and Automation in uh manufacturing emissions began to rise more steeply uh to reach at the uh the alltime high of uh around uh 37 gigaton in
2022 uh business uh businesses generally play a big part in this and uh can prevent or at least decelerate the climate change uh which uh apart from the carbon reduction impact and the environmental impact of it creates some um side Financial opportunities and other opportunities for your business
And company and we will discuss them in the next slides uh but why this should matter and why we should care about this first and foremost to prevent that the effect of glob global warming and we know all that the Earth has been heating up over the
Last century with 2023 has been the hottest year of history with almost 1.5 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial level but um as you can see in the graph uh it’s you know constantly the average temperature is increasing this is uh the the latest update is uh um August
2023 but we just last week had a um a new high record as well uh so when it comes to uh climate change and the global warming every very single um half a degree even matters and you know uh one might think that I mean it’s it’s okay it’s only 1 degree
Celsius I I personally appreciate it here in Newcastle it means um uh longer uh summer maybe but uh it doesn’t work like that you know the fact is that the global uh the global warming even in very small temperature rises in a broad global scale can have devastating results because it directly increases
The risk of sea level rise wildfires extreme weather um impacts species Extinction pandemics drought food insecurity climate migration and so many other problem problems in a global um scale um and all of these consequences are sort of interconnected uh just just uh focusing on the wildfires for example uh only in
2023 I was uh reading a report that nearly 23 million Acres well were burned in uh wildfires that’s let’s put it into you know more sensible figures that’s equal to 16 football pitches every minute uh that’s the uh the land that we burned uh last year in
2023 and uh that means you know the destruction of land food resources biod diversity and so on and it’s um surprising always for me to see the if you check it online this uh website which is the NASA uh wildfires uh the the the real time wildfires map it’s
Always uh surprising I had this photo just for for this uh this morning and these uh red dots are the uh spot in the planet that currently just as we speak are burning and uh if you zoom in just in Europe as we we are in the middle of
Um winter you can see lots of spots also uh in fire even in Europe so um that’s a real emergency that we all need to really concern about it but um what’s the role of a UK businesses here ummes generally or uh mmes as we recently call them micro small and
Medium Enterprises compris of 90% and 99% of UK businesses and uh they accounting for 61% of ukm employment these 5.5 million businesses around the UK um often have relatively small um emission footprint at at the individual Le uh level but uh they collectively account for around half of
The emission released from the total UK businesses so the climate change act binds the UK to reach Net Zero uh net zero emissions by 20150 as a part of commitment to 2015 Paris agreement uh to keep the uh temperature Rises uh below 2° and as um uh close as possible to 1.5
Dees uh but we also have some midterm uh targets for example uh we we have to uh reduce the carbon emissions by 78% by 2035 uh also we are committed to 100% decarbonize the power system by 2035 um we also need to phe out fossil fuel cars by
2030 or 2035 this is it was due to uh to Beyond 2035 but um Rishi son pushed it back to 20 2035 and also um 80 to 100% face off uh face out of installation of new gas spoilers by 2035 these are the midterm uh uh targets
And commitments in the UK and businesses are uh the important part of uh that that journey and they have to adapt to uh new uh regulations and hopefully by end of this session you will have some information you need to uh what what you need to really decide and what options
Uh are available in the market for you to start this journey um okay let’s start with some of the uh the main principles that we all need to understand um before be able to you know plan and design our uh decarbonization plans uh the first one and the most uh probably important one
Is the emission Scopes uh which are the standardized way of categorizing Greenhouse uh gas emissions based on their Source uh which can you know this categorization helps um helps us to account for all emissions avoid double counting and also identify the biggest lacks and uh the biggest opportunities uh within your business uh
But very brief here scope one are the direct emissions from the sources owned by the company scope two are uh emissions in direct emissions from the purchase energy that you consume uh in your permises and um scope three uh is all IND indirect emissions from the company’s operation uh face so
Today uh the the the measures that we um we’re going to discuss today mainly affect the scope one and two emissions um again as we um touched on that scope uh one covers the emissions from sources that your organization owns or directly controls for example um uh
Some of the the most obvious examples are the gas or or oil that you’re burning in your boilers uh the the um company vehicles that are not um uh electric the leaks from the the the refrigeration system and all the refrigerants which are used in the um uh
In the equipment of your company and also uh the process emission such as um Factory fumes and chemicals and lastly uh the emissions from Agri culture activities if you have the scope 2 emissions um are GH emissions uh associated with the the purchase energy uh for your company for most of the
Smmes uh the the uh the scope to is just the electricity you uh buy from the grid uh but you might have some heating uh from the heat networks that um goes under this scoped uh two emissions or you might have some purchased Steam for your industrial
Processes um and finally scope three uh are all indirect emissions associated with the upstream and down stream activities of your company’s value chain basically all other indirect uh emissions which are not included in uh scope two can be uh categorized under the scope Tre which can be for
Businesses which can vary between 50 even to 70 80% of uh the the companies um uh emissions some some examples are uh the the business travels on vehicles not owned by the company the staff commun uh commuting emissions from purchased Goods services for example the raw materials papers coffee it device anything that
You buy for your company transport of these goods and also uh all emissions from uh own assets of the company for example if you have any investment properties if you have any Acquisitions if you have any um um other lending activities uh they also uh need to taken into account within the emission
Calculation of your company and also the the emissions uh related to waste management and Disposal uh but what does Net Zero means Net Zero is the actually the next fundamental principle that we need to compreh uh comprehend here Net Zero refers to a state in which the greenhouse gas uh
Going into atmosphere are balanced by the emission removals from the atmosphere so achieving this balance between the the the emissions that we generate and the emissions we remove or save from the atmosphere uh we call it net it can be achieved through the the combination of two main strategies one
Is reducing the emissions as much as possible and the next one can be uh actually the the first uh Str Strate uh strategy needs to comprehend with the compensation for emissions by equivalent carbon saving elsewhere but the uh carbon offsetting itself uh can be achieved in two ways basically
Uh by two approaches let’s say uh firstly are the compensatory off offsets uh which means buying emissions reductions um um from elsewhere it means that you you pay uh TOS projects to reduce carbon emissions um U elsewhere and also um for example the the investment in environmental projects renewable energy
Waste management and that sort of projects and the second approach um is the uh carbon removals uh which are um using the the some uh kind of Technologies for example like the carbon capture and carbon storage Technologies or using the tree plant uh tree planting and reforestation but carbon ofing alone is
Not enough and doesn’t make few carbon neutral let’s say uh this should be accompanied as as we said uh by implementation of suitable uh measures to proactively reduce your carbon footprint uh this means avoiding emitting ggs in the first place the approach we we call it uh
Decarbonization so uh as a business uh why we should care about C O2 emissions here uh apart from the you know the first and foremost obviously is the climate emergency and our social responsibility to to tackle it um but apart from the the environmental and our social responsibility there are some
Other benefits to reducing carbon emissions fores as well uh the first one would be the reducing operation costs cutting carbon emissions goes hand in hand with boosting Energy Efficiency which means lower utility bills and other expenses so although taking um um actions imposes some uh upfront cost for
You but um at the end of the day uh when you have implemented them you will definitely save some money in the long run uh also it boost your competitiveness in the market for your products and for services that you provide um because you know as we know C cumers are
Increasingly becoming conscious and um caring about the the environmental issues so carbon redu uh reduction boost your brand value and boost your uh reputation in the market it also helps you to keep up with the regulatory comp uh compliance um we have for example the CRP requirement for the procurements for
The government uh these days um which is a a a uration recently set up for businesses who want to trade with uh with government uh in in um major contracts and also um it’s you know using that you can you getting ahead of regulations and Market shift positions
Businesses to to thrive in the long term as uh this uh transition continues and um lastly uh but not least that the uh it will enable um some funding opportunities for your business and grants um which are um allocated to um uh businesses who want to uh be green
Uh and there are lots of local Council uh grants they are governmental grants that you can apply and um use them for your um for your company but uh where to start our and Net Zero Journey uh this graph shows the general Journey uh approach taken to to it’s
Kind of common route that all business have to have to uh take to reach Net Zero it starts with finding what is the carbon footprint in your uh base here uh then uh we set uh that the commitment and targets for when and how much uh we have to decarbonize our activities and
Then we once we have these targets set then we we need to set planned actions and time frames to achieve them uh in the third step uh this is the step that we we um uh produce carbon reduction plan uh the CRP which we uh had a touch on that and
Uh which is increasingly actually becoming uh Central in the space and um is uh now the requirement for as we said major contracts with the government uh government and this is also one of the services that we provide but um today uh we are mostly focused on the
The um the the fourth and fifth stage uh uh based on this plan then then the next step will be implementing the uh Energy Efficiency and renewable measures uh and uh emission reduction uh interventions basically we also develop and Implement some strategies to engage employees in the net zero journey
And make the progress um at the end uh The Next Step deal with the supply change management uh carbon of setting and monitoring processes which are further steps for reaching Net Zero and controlling it uh so we can uh simply put simply to uh the first three steps
As plans and the actions and the uh the last steps as maintaining or maintenance the the the the plan but today we going to focus mainly in the first two uh uh in the uh actually the uh the the um two middle um steps which are related to action
Plan but before diving into the uh Solutions we have to understand the current state of the energy consumption and carbon footprint within the company that’s how we can identify the gaps and opportunities in terms of energy performance carbon reduction across all the uh operations uh in our business so
We have to make a thorough evaluation of past and present energy consumption and patterns uh this information helps us to detect energy and carbon intensive areas where improvements can be made uh the also uh makes the ground work for identifying the priorities in Energy Efficiency upgrades and finally this
Enables us to monitor the effectiveness of energy saving initiatives that we have implemented and U make adjustments if needed um the energy data that we uh need to uh collect at the as the first step um can be obtained by measuring the energy consumption from utility meters from
Electricity and natural gas uh mainly located in the uh property uh these data are uh often uh available in the utility builds but more regular monitoring is also highly recommended to keep a record of the energy usage in shorter intervals for example every week or even uh every day
But if you have a smart meter already installed in your Peres you probably will be able to get the half hourly data from um the the smart meters uh this data can be provided to the customer in a spreadsheet in Excel spreadsheet by which you can analyze the patterns of
Use intensity times when the the the energy might have uh uh been wasted and um you know using the if you get that um uh data uh Excel data from the from the from your supplier or um if you download it from your portal then you can easily
Extract it to extract it to a figure like that um using Excel by which you can easily you know um identify the the patterns where you have wasted energy where you have the most intense um the the the time of energy consumption and Etc uh but the next stage would be energy
Audits uh by conducting uh energy audits companies can identify areas of energy wastage and inefficiency uh we basically have three levels of um energy audit the the first um level uh which is the walkth through analysis is the most basic level of uh audits includes uh reviewing the energy
Bills and walking through the sites this gives us a starting point for making changes uh or further in depths auditing the next level uh willo would be the uh more detailed analysis of the energy consumption um uh and um at this level we actually uh broke the energy
Consumption down by end users and um uh we also can and um we also have to interview with the important building Personnel uh who are in charge of the um different equipment or uh more aware of their consumption pattern uh to uh get some information about their operation
And the areas of potential problems within the permes and the last um uh level of energy audit will be in depth uh engineering and cost analysis of the potential changes uh uh and uh some submetering with um specific equipment might be needed at this stage but uh we uh probably we don’t uh
Expect everyone to do a in-depth uh energy audit in their uh businesses but at least the level one the walkth through um energy audit is absolutely necessary uh which can be done also by yourself uh to to U we need to ID y energy intensive areas specific to your
Company and this is um vary Case by case between businesses depending on the building processes equipment and the uh basically working culture of that company uh but the just that uh level uh the first level of energy audit gives you enough information to identify areas that require immediate attention and
Come up with some purpose built and Custom measures to uh reduce the energy consumption and also uh boost your uh environmental performance uh or you can for um uh for level two or level three you can have um you can hire professional energy auditor to conduct more comprehensive one uh but most of
The quick measures that we’re going to cover today will be disc uh will uh can be done based on the level one energy audit uh but let’s um give some top tips to help energy a this if you want to do it yourself um basically we need a record
Of all the energy consumption uh within the company how where and when the energy is being used and what is the regular routine of the the energy consumption uh of the the the company um therefore we need uh first of all as many photos and notes as possible you
Need to take photograph of building features for example the windows uh installation edac systems we need take photos from lighting fixtures appliances and the plug loads also we need photographs from equipment name plates where we can find the DAT make model serial number power rating and
Information like that um also we we have to make notes of their um the runtime hours the temperature es the environmental conditions the notes that might be helpful in the future for uh planning and designing the Energy Efficiency measures uh we also need to speak to regular users of the equipment
And appliances at the permes ask them how and how long they use appliances or equipment if they perform well uh or if it seems that they they have some problems um also ask your uh employees if the lighting and the the heating is uh sufficient in their working
Environment also have some you know getting your production managers uh and line managers to explain the the if you have any machines operating in the uh processes and the the procedure of them the Sho schedule of operating them and the possible faults in the the the
System uh we also need to keep the record of all these information store all the documents and cataloges related to equipment appliances hedback refrigerator uh refrigeration and uh boiler Pals and uh basically all sorts of the equipment that you use in the in the building uh if you can create a
Spreadsheet uh for equipment inventory and the the name plate data will be really help ful and also updating this documentation after any changes being made in the company um the other tip is that don’t assume that it’s the best way because it’s always been done that way
Always question if equipment run uh r equipment runtime can be reduced investigate if some smart controls or setting adjustment can save energy or identify the insufficient equipment um in and uh inefficient equipment um or uh inefficient uh areas within the within the uh company and finally
Always um is helpful to have a fresh pair of eyes uh which can detect some lags that you have uh that have been hidden from your eyes so we go to next slide which is the I think is uh my uh last slide here just to sum up the section I want to
Highlight the general approach we usually take in our processes so uh it needs to be highlighted that decarbonization starts with reducing consumption and minimizing the waste before moving on uh any more further sophisticated in intervention such as um installation of Renewables for instance uh this is logically financially and
Environmentally best first step uh in the net zero Journey consumption reduction makes early carbon and um very easy cost reductions for smmes while preparing them for more advanced sustainability measures um and also um uh the other uh kind of General approach we always take is that when it comes to
Building Heating and the AC uh fabric first approach is always the approach we we highly recommend fabric first uh simply means that the maximi maximizing the performance of the building’s envelope to improve the building’s Energy Efficiency this approach Cost You Less at The Upfront stage and also prepares
Your building for the future in uh intervation so uh we we all know that the the new generation of building heating system for example they operate in lower temperatures so uh to be able to um uh prepare your building for next generation of heating uh systems you you
Have to uh make your uh building as airtight as possible and uh insulate uh as much as possible to make it more efficient basically uh and also always consider which energy using processes and Equipment are non-essential for example or they running time if the running time can be
Reduced for example um AC um um air conditioning system might be running 24 hours uh which can be easily um you know reduce energy by um setting a timer for that for example and the final Point uh is that the big impacts always start with a small change and the small
Savings don’t expect to make huge saving after the the very few uh initial steps the scale of the potential saving potential uh basically cost Sav that you you can make from Energy Efficiency measures really depends on the current um um usage uh and the current level of energy uh consumption of your business
Larger industrial facilities obviously have uh will have greater um cost reductions and the small uh businesses uh we’ll have small smaller energy uh a smaller energy saving and the smaller cost saving uh and also there are some always no cost Behavior changes or no cost measures that you can easily um implemen
In your business to to um start this net Z Journey with no cost uh and um yeah that’s it from me and uh I’m happy to get any questions from you before handing it over to fill to start with the quick measures for your business and feel free to either raise a
Hand or um type the questions in the uh I think we’ve got a a Q&A box is that right Helen yeah um it’s oh oh sorry in in the chat the chat’s the the reliable place to type questions and answers um if if you if you do have any either now
Or throughout the rest of the session okay Mo it looks like we’re uh good to continue shall I take over from here yeah yeah I can stop sharing my screen and the the floor is yours now great thanks very much Mo um right I’m Phil uh Phil I’m um head of group for
The Energy Efficiency Renewables and storage group at discerner um just bear with me while I share my screen there we go okay so um hopefully everyone can hear me okay um thanks Mo for that introduction um that gives us a a good sort of basis from which
To develop some ideas on what to do about Energy Efficiency and um carbon emissions reduction um so this this session now it it it’s called quick winds um the idea is to cover some either low cost SL no cost measures that can be implemented by businesses to reduce energy consumption in particular
Or quick wins that you can that you can gain by um taking the right approach towards some more costly more sizable measures that you might otherwise be considering um so that there’s there’s right ways and wrong ways to go about some of this as well
Um so uh yeah the there is uh there’s quite a lot that can be done um to to decarbonize um some of it is very very expensive um and some of it’s uh very trendy so big solar PV installations they’re uh All the Rage really popular for good reason but also
Quite expensive um and there’s other sizable projects that um while effective are not necessarily um essential to make significant decarbonization um improvements to a business so um one one um one issue with some of these lowcost no cost um quick win type interventions is that they can often be
Quite hard to quantify the the benefits from um so things like um just intro introducing changes in people’s behavior for example it’s difficult to measure the impact of doing that um and sometimes the the individual measures that you in introduce to a business they may have quite a modest
Improvement um but collectively they can have a make a large difference um and so I’ve I’ve mentioned there in the slide that um you take taking this marginal gains principle which came out of Elite Sports uh in particular cycling um even though even once you think you’ve made the biggest changes you can
And the biggest improvements you can there’s often a large number of small improvements that you can make that individually make a very little difference but collectively can make a huge difference and so um it’s worth considering um even some of these fairly minor improvements um because the the
The some total of them can be quite significant um so the the slides that uh that you’ll see now that um are going to cover quite a quite a lot of ground um first starting with uh just a couple of slides about identifying sources of energy waste um it’s important to
Eliminate waste before you um make any other sort of significant improvements it’s the the lowest cost way to reduce energy consumption um then um nearly every business has a premises um and so will focus on some building fabric improvements some of them do cost money
Some of them are very very cheap um but there’s a a strategy to take to do it in the right way to make sure that the that you’re not sort of you’re not sort of throwing good money after bad as it were um similarly with lighting specifically
LED lighting it can be expensive but there are ways to do it that are a bit more a bit smarter than than just simply replacing one light with another um and then so and then from after lighting we’ll jump into Building Services by which I mean um heating
Cooling uh ventilation that sort of thing and then after that I’ll talk a bit about compressed air I’m not sure the kind of industries that you’re all from um but in manufacturing and engineering particular compressed are is pretty ubiquitous and it’s uh it’s one of the biggest thing B biggest areas for
Improvement in a lot of places so we’ll talk talk about that a little bit as well and then beyond that um I’ll go on to talk about uh a few um sort of What Not Tod do um and uh and and some mistakes that we’ve seen in the
Past and uh after that um I’ll jump into a separate session just to introduce some Concepts around Renewables um so after the quick winds we’ll we’ll talk about the slightly more costly renewable energy systems for a little bit um so firstly uh identifying energy waste
Um we do an awful lot of site surveys and and as Mo mentioned quite often the the fresh pair of eyes is is as much a benefit as any expertise that we might might be bringing to the site um it’s often the case that people are so heavily focused on doing their
Own work um working to their strengths and just carrying out their day-to-day duties that they’re not necessarily F sort of concerning themselves too much with Energy Efficiency which is quite understandable um Energy Efficiency is not always um the most convenient thing to consider when doing your work for
Example um if it was in a factory somebody might leave um leave one of their tools switched on or one of their machines switched on just because it’s convenient to have it on and ready for when they next need it um but it may be using energy the entire time it’s on
Even if it’s just sitting on standby or idling um and then that’s a potential source for energy waste and it’s things like that that um that businesses they often Overlook or just don’t have the the time or resource to sort of consider dayto day and often they’ll become blind to a
Lot of these things because thinking of it in any other way is kind of a hindrance to just going about the the normal day-to-day work um so to to make some um easy improvements to Energy Efficiency it just it requires somebody either from out outside the company or
From inside the company just to take a different perspective take a step back and uh think about these things from Another angle um pay paying particular attention to Energy Efficiency um but there is often a bit of detective work that’s needed um and that detective work
Is so that you can find where energy is being wasted um if energy is being wasted and and finding the exact cause of it and that work can take um the form of doing energy monitoring um either looking at energy bills um the half hourly Energy billing that Mo showed
Earlier um or putting in equipment where you can record energy consumption either at the level of a distribution board or at the level of an individual piece of equipment um and you can measure energy use indirectly as well um using things like environmental um monitors and meters
That record things like light levels or the temperature in a room um to indicate when something when lights are switched on or when heating is running um or if in the in the case of a factory if there’s a lot of Motors that are running you can just record the sound or the
Vibration of that equipment and and that would indicate when it’s been switched on and when it’s been switched off and from that you can you can then work out out how much energy it’s consuming and how much of the time it is operating and if that if that sort of time use profile
Matches the work schedule or if it’s if equipment might be getting left switched on outside of working hours for example um excuse me sorry yes so um we’ll jump into the building fabric um improvements so namely insulation and draft proofing um there’s uh as with many things there’s a a sort of a
Logical hierarchy to approach this with um and specifically talking about building fabric there are a number of different improvements that you might consider making uh draft proof being one of them and the various kinds of insulation improvements being the others um there’s in there’s a
General um a a general sort of order in which these things should really be considered um the the logic being that you should implement the lowest cost improvements with the highest impact first and work from there down to the sort of highest cost lowest impact measures um and the the general case is
That draft proofing is by far the lowest cost Improvement that you can make and also has one of the highest impacts in a lot of buildings particularly old ones where there’s a lot of a lot of draftiness and air leakage through things like um the S around the sides of um
Window frames under doors um cracks in walls even or between the walls and floors of buildings um but moving on from that the you can see on the slide here that the the order in which to assess things in terms of lowest cost to highest cost and highest
Impact down to lower lowest impact it kind of goes in this order so roof space Loft instulation um is quite a cheap kind of insallation to install and cavity wall installation quite similar um all the way down to double glazing which is a really expensive option soorry just bear with me a
Sec yeah so um as I mentioned draft proofing is the thing to do first especially if you’re looking for for low cost options um or even no cost options in some cases um it’s one of these things that is usually such a low cost with such a large improve impact on Energy
Efficiency that it’s probably worth doing without worrying about specifically how much energy it’s going to save or how much it’s going to cost to install because it’s one of these technologies that can generally be installed by people on site by by unskilled staff um with no no specialist
Training needed a lot of the products that are used to to draft proof a building are designed designed for consumers to install and the drafts in buildings poor rare tightness in other words it’s often sort of the biggest component to heat loss in a building um particularly in commercial buildings
Um and therefore it’s uh it’s probably worth just making sure that drafts are eliminated wherever possible um with without needing to run any sort of particular feasibility study or business case assessment or anything like that um and also because because air leaks can be so such a significant part of
Heat loss in a building they it really does need to be addressed before any other Energy Efficiency sort of insulation improvements are considered um because heat will kind of take the path of least resistance and you can insulate up to the highest standard um but if there are gaps around the walls
And windows you’re still going to be losing a lot of heat for example if you have a warehouse um with a roller shutter door there’s very little point in adding huge amounts of insulation to the walls or the roof if that roller shutter door is wide open because all of
The Heat’s just going to be blasting through that door um and the the ation is going to add very little to the building’s performance the um so so when it comes to draft proofing um there’s uh there’s actually it’s it’s it’s more than the simple effect of
Reducing heat leaking out of a building there is actually a compound effect that makes it um doubly doubly effective um to the sort of comfort level experienced by people in a building not only does um sealing up drafts prevent heat escaping from a building it it also uh it reduces the
Amount of air movement in a building so you’ve you’ve all heard the term wind chill um that’s a sort of extreme version of this but basically the the more air movement there is the the more of a cooling effect there is on people’s skin and so you’ll you’ll be familiar with
Sitting in with the the feeling of sitting in a draft and that’s not necessarily cold air blowing on you it’s just the fact that there is air moving at all um Air at a given temperature feels cooler if it’s moving than if it’s uh than if it’s stationary
So um drafts in a building will increase the amount of air movement and therefore for people to feel comfortable the temperature needs to be that little bit higher where where the air is moving around more so sealing up drafts will uh will have that double effect of preventing heat loss but also making
People just feel more comfortable at any given temperature um it’s worth so so when it comes to draft proofing it’s worth doing a kind of a a sight survey really to to assess where air is leaking it’s quite easy to identify drafts you can feel feel the Cool Breeze
Wherever there is a draft as I’m sure you’re aware um but even it’s worth carrying out one of these surveys even if you think that there have been um air tightness improvements installed sometime in the building’s history over time the things like the sort of foam rubber seals around windows and doors
They can deteriorate or they can be painted over um it’s quite common to see these draft seals being gloss painted and then they become far less effective and be they can become compressed and they and then begin to allow drafts to reemerge through those openings so it’s
Worth just going around and seeing if if those seals are actually doing their job um and it might be worth replacing them or adding more um more sealant into those areas um there are cases though where simple improvements like adding some foam or strips or tape that it just
Isn’t up to the job buildings do move over time um things like windows and door frames and other other sort of joins in a building they can open up um and it can become such a problem that you do then need some professional help that the example in the picture there is
A a single glazed aluminum window frame which to start with is pretty bad in terms of insulation but in this case it the the building had moved mov D so much over time there was a good inch air gap um effectively you’ve got an open window
There and in this case the room was freezing but the heating was absolutely blasting out of the radiators and so the amount of energy waste just from that single room was absolutely huge and and probably equivalent to most of the rest of the building combined
Um and the fact that it was it was a high rise building meant that the the the wind outside was really was really quite severe a lot lot of the time so the the the the heat loss from that particular building was really quite extreme um but yes something to
Something to be aware of and and that’s when it does uh Verge on being more of a a professional skilled piece of work to fix um so as I showed in a few slides ago there’s this hierarchy of building um Fabric or insulation improvements and so talking about insulation itself um we
Can once you sorted the the air tightness of the building out it’s then worth thinking about the strategy for improving insulation and sticking sticking to that kind of hierarchy if it’s possible to insulate your roof space carry out Loft insulation um that’s usually the cheapest and one of the most effective
Things to to start off with um it doesn’t require a great deal of skill to install it doesn’t require a huge amount of disruption and there’s very little in the way of cosmetic um remedial work required afterwards because usually the loft insallation is out of sight and there’s
No actual fixing down required so the cost is pretty low similarly with cavity wall insulation um usually that’s uh a similar price per square meter of of insulation but it’s usually not as thick so the insulation this the Energy savings from it aren’t quite as good as
Loft insulation but um you can see in this table the general cost per square meter and the the payback period um goes in that kind of order down to so after cavity wall insulation there are options for solid walls where there’s no wall cavity um you could insulate either internally
In the rooms themselves or on the outside of the building the reason they’re so expensive is that they do require remedial work afterwards to leave a an aesthetic aesthetically satisfactory finish either by adding plaster board on the inside or uh a weatherproof render or cladding on the
Outside of the building and you also need to consider shifting all of the things like on the inside things like uh skirting boards plug sockets potentially Plumbing Outlets Furniture any any fixed Furniture would need moving as well and so there’s there’s a lot to consider there and on the outside similarly
There’s um things like window frames um other elements fixed to the out outside of walls like drainage and ventilation equipment so that that’s why they get so expensive um although the the actual Energy savings can be quite significant um right down at the bottom here double glazing it’s a really
Popular thing um to to install and for people to want to install um and I did indicate it’s down at the bottom there but I just wondered if anyone might have an idea of how long it takes to for double glazing to pay for itself in other words
Um in other words um if you if you have a business that installs double glazing to replace its old single glaze Windows um how long do you think it might take for the Energy savings from that Improvement to pay for the initial cost of the double glazing um my colleague
Helen is going to uh unleash a quick pull on you um just so you can have a guess e yeah sorry but that’s slight technical issue um the wrong poll was issued but uh yes here you can see the double glaze poll now um so if you have a go
Answering that we’ll come back to the compressed air one uh later on okay yeah so it looks like looks like most of you have had to go at answering that um and yeah so 30 years payback period is actually it’s quite optimistic um we
I think to for it to be any better than that you’d have to have extremely high energy costs for heating um the reality is that the Energy savings themselves rarely show a payback period within the lifespan of the double glazing and so sometimes there are additional benefits so the simply the insulation
Benefit of double glazing is not going to cover the cost of the of of of the system itself but the Improvement in things like air tightness um by by installing new window frames it that can significantly improve the the benefits of installing double glazing but very often it becomes um
Something that’s done out of necessity either because the window frames have deteriorated so much that they need replacement or aesthetically the the building just needs updating um so in terms of simple insulation improvements the it’s only ever going to be a very modest energy saving unless you have a
Huge amount of glazing um compared to the wall area of of your building right I’m just going to find my slides again here we go right thanks for that um so that that was building fabric I’m going to jump into LED lighting briefly um which is something that is pretty
Well understood now and it’s pretty well accepted that LED lighting in most situations is going to save energy compared to the older lighting types and in fact now it’s really the only option that you have in almost all situations um for for new lighting the there was a a phase out that
Happened last year towards the start of the Autumn last year which um made it illegal to for for manufacturers to produce any new fluorescent light um fluorescent lighting tubes so e even the more energy efficient thin type what they call T5 fluorescent tubes those but even also
The older types of fluorescent lights um industrial lighting like metal halight or um I think High Press sodium as well because not not because of Energy Efficiency but because all of those they have some amount of mercury in them it’s the the environmental impact of disposing of them meant that they were
No longer um acceptable and once retailers have sold out of all of their Old Stock you won’t be able to buy them anymore so LEDs in nearly every case um are the only option left but so although although by default people will be installing new LED lighting uh and they
Generally will save at least uh 50% of the energy consumption of Lights if you’re replacing older fluorescent lighting or similar um there are some important considerations um to to bear in mind before you just simply replace one old light with a new LED um it’s it can be pretty pretty costly
Um as well so especially if there’s specialist lighting like in a sports venue um the the actual cost to install or maybe to access certain lighting types it can be really quite quite significant um and so doing something with the the sort of traditional lighting upgrade approach has often been when a
Light fails you replace it with an LED um but so so peace meal around a building replacing replacing each failure with a new one that’s not necessarily the best approach especially if things like Access Equipment are required it can be far far more cost- effective to be a bit
More strategic about it and to plan ahead and to consider a whole site LED upgrade partly because it’s usually cheaper to purchase a large number of Lights rather than one at a time also if you do need something like scaffolding or um powered Access Equipment you might
Only need to hire that once rather than H than hire it repeatedly um and also there are benefits from taking a a whole site uh top down approach to an LED lighting project um which which you wouldn’t be able to achieve if you were doing it one
Light at a time um one of those one of those things to consider is the the lighting in a building is not necessarily appropriate for how the site is being used and so for example it’s quite common to find uh an office that where the light levels are just too high
Or if you were to replace each existing light with a new led the the the greater um directionality of the LED lights in other words the light that they put out is usually pointed more um in the direction it’s needed compared to all the lighting types and therefore if you get if you
Replace one LED uh with the equivalent lighting output fluorescent light you’ll end up with a brighter space than you might expect and so it’s not necessarily sensible to just simply replace every single light fitting with a new LED you could end up using far more energy from
The lighting than you actually need to and so you that’s something that you may not be able to um fix by simply replacing one light with another as they fail so if you take the whole sight approach you can do a proper new lighting design and make sure
That you’re only installing the lights that you actually need um and there’s a there’s a a misconception that I’ve come across a few times when I’ve done site energy Audits and that is that where where you you do have fluorescent lights rather than replacing the light with the light
Fitting with an LED to save energy I’ve seen it a few times where people have taken out one of the tubes of within that fitting for example if there’s a if there’s four tubes per fitting in a ceiling grid type um light light fitting um you could
Take out one of those tubes to reduce the light output and in theory save energy um perhaps a quarter of the energy but if the lighting is of a sufficent L old variety the the ballast the the equipment the the device in the fitting that um provides
The um provides the voltage that the that the fluorescent tubes require to operate it can actually continue consuming energy with or without a tube in it and so it can actually be worse for the light fitting in terms of lifespan and consume pretty much the same amount of
Energy even if one of the tubes is taken out um if you do plan to do a sort of a whole sight lighting upgrade um like I say being a bit planning appropriately for it and being strategic about it is the way to go um and it’s quite simple
To work out the kind of energy consumption to expect from something like LED lighting um and it can be quite an quite an accurate prediction from a simple calculation so very briefly Ju Just it may be obvious to some of you but if you wanted to work out the kind of energy
Savings that you might be able to achieve from a lighting upgrade all you need to do is identify the the the lights that you currently have um you can if you if you’re able to look closely at one of your fluorescent tubes for example it should tell you the wattage on right on
The tube count up the number of tubes or lamps of that particular type and and uh there and then work out the total wattage so the number of light the number of lamps times the individual lamp wattage um divide it by a th to work to get it into kilowatts and do the
Same thing for the proposed new lights take the new light kilowatt to the kilowatt total of the new lights from the kilowatt total of the old lights and then multiply it by the number of hours of use you expect them to see over a year and that will tell you the annual
Kilowatt hour saving of that lighting upgrade so it really is pretty simple to come up with a decent estimate of Energy savings and you can play around with the the design the lighting the the specific light lighting Products that you plan to use and just see what the effect is and
See where the the sort of sweet spot is in terms of Energy savings versus uh Capital cost um one thing to be aware of though um is and you may have experienced this by buying cheap LEDs from certain uh well-known International importing type uh online shops you you
May have noticed that if you buy LED lights that are particular cheap and not of a known brand that they fail really quickly um and it’s really common because LED lighting it comes in a vast spectrum of quality and if you don’t go with a sort of a known brand that has a
Reput some kind of representation in this country you’re not likely to get the kind of warranty or quality that you you should expect from electrical equipment um and as a guide when we’re recommending a lighting upgrade we try to find appropriate light fittings and and lamps that have around a 5year warranty
And about a 50,000 hour life expectancy um if at all possible and that should indicate that the that it’s of a decent quality but also try and go for brands that that you recognize or that um that have a a strong um presence within this country so that you have some kind of
Recourse if there is a quality issue um a few years ago there was a a project carried out by the EU called premium light Pro and that was to try and address the the difficulty of identifying high quality Lighting systems um and although it’s a few years old now that is still um
So there’s still some good guidance within that project and the the reports that they generated and so if you’re considering um designing a new lighting system yourself um or if you want to be armed with some good information before you get a contractor to to propose a new system for you then
Take a look at that guide there and it should give you all the information you might need to uh to make make sure that you’re getting something of high high enough quality um so talked about replacing lights um installing new LEDs but it’s um just doing that is not necessarily the only
Way to save energy from lighting um and there can be some much lower cost simple improvements either with the new lighting that you might be installing or even with the existing lights that you have and um the and and it’s all to do with the the control of the lights so
There’s various control types for lighting some of which you’ll be pretty familiar with um and very often they’re all designed to to save energy the and one of the most common things that you’ve probably most directly familiar with the motion senses that you might see from um it it the you
You’ll probably see them in places like um toilets and and bathrooms um sometimes in corridors and other other spaces that are only used intermittently um the lights switch on automatically when somebody comes into the room and they’ll switch off after a given time or if they if they uh so
Sometimes it’s they’re based on motion sometimes they’re based on infrared senses so they they’ll detect heat from people or um other objects in the room and then and only switch off when that heat detection uh when that that protected heat goes away um some people absolutely hate these kind of things
Because there is I’ve experienced it a lot but um I’m sure everyone else has when you go into somewhere like a toilet if you if you stand or sit still for just sometimes sort of 30 seconds the you can all of a sudden be left in complete darkness and it’s uh pretty
Disconcerting when that happens but that’s not that’s not the be all and end all of those kind of systems it that’s often a case that they just haven’t been set up correctly um the the time that they are left switched on for can be adjusted in nearly every case and
So just a a tweak of the actual settings in those controls should mean that they work far more appropriately and with with correct setup sensors like that can be used in a lot more locations Than People realize um so corridors is one example um but also um even office spaces using
The right kind of controls and with the right sort of time settings um Can ensure that as long as people are in there doing some kind of activity the lights will stay on and it’s worth considering putting these in anywhere that it’s where it’s at all possible because um Studies have shown
That the energy saving from using these kind of sensors can be anywhere between 30 to 80% even at the most pessimistic estimate you you’re still saving about a third of the energy from your lighting by installing these sensors so it’s worth in installing them wherever you think it might be acceptable
Um we’ve seen some good results from having them installed in warehousing for example so spaces where there’s tall aisles of shelving um so Warehouse uh pallet racking that sort of thing if you have a a motion sensor at the at the sort of front end of each of those
Aisles then the lighting it above those sections can SW be switched on individually only when they’re actually needed um and if it’s if it’s uh if they’re installed in the right place and there’s no safety risks from having the having lights off in those areas um they’ll they’ll switch on whenever
There’s a person or a forklift truck in the area um so other types of uh controls that that are automated um can be based on the time of day or night um or on the light level and it’s important to remember that daylight is a really nice convenient
Source of free lighting that’s not often maximized in buildings but places where there’s sufficient glazing um either from Windows or from roof lights um there’s it’s often possible to balance that daylight level with artificial lighting um through the use of either off-on sensors or or or slightly fancier
Dimming controls so that when the only when the the amount of daylight available drops below a certain level to to the artificial lights inside switch on um and I’ve seen it in again in warehouses and factories where there’s a lot of roof lighting u a lot of transparent roof panels that throughout
A lot of the day artificial lighting is not needed um although it it’s usually switched on anyway but with appropriate controls the actual light level can be maintained by brightening or dimming the indoor lighting appropriately so that the the overall light in the space is kept the same
Um and that’s uh that’s that’s us that’s something that’s not often done although the those kind of day and night senses as you can see in the picture there they’re quite common for outdoor lighting so things like security lighting um car park lighting that kind of thing it’s um they’re they’re pretty
Common in those situations um but not so common for managing the daylight levels within a building going even further if you have a building management system BMS or some kind of smart control system for lighting um the time of use of that of that lighting can be controlled
Automatically based on things like um room booking systems so um in a place like a hotel or anywhere where there’s hospitality suite the the room booking system can be tied to the lighting so that the lights only come on when those rooms are in use and all of this just ensures that the
The use of lighting does not depend on somebody switching the lights off when they leave a room and it saves somebody especially on a large site it saves somebody having to walk around the entire site to just switching off lights um which is often a chore that people don’t want to have to
Do all the time um and so automating this process is usually guaranteed to save a lot of energy and the the the payb from installing these kind of controls is that they usually it’s usually measured in months rather than years and so again it’s one of these one of these quick
Wins that’s probably worth doing whether or not you are going to calculate the potential benefits of it um it’s worth being aware I mentioned security lighting and Outdoor Lighting but the tradition way to control these things is often with one of these mechanical time clocks um if you ever
Look in a a plant room or a a meter CID it’s quite common to see one of these um as as shown in the the photo there they’re they do a job they they switch lights off at a certain time of day uh and switch them on at a certain time of
Day but they’re very limited um and they’re often completely ignored so so they’re when the when they’re installed they’re set up in a certain way and then never touched ever again um but they they’re not always set appropriately for the current uh use of the building they only have a single onoff
Setting so the the the major problem with them is that they they will operate in exactly the same way seven days a week and so if you’re if you have a car park that has lighting controlled with one of these for example you may not need them need that Lighting on over the
Weekend when there’s nobody there um again you probably don’t need the same settings in the summer as you do in the winter and so these kind of controls are not particularly smart and in this in the case of a site that’s closed during the weekend you might be using
27th of the uh more energy than you actually need to there’s two two days out of seven that you don’t need that Lighting on but this control type isn’t uh isn’t sophisticated enough to deal with that so it’s quite straightforward to in to install a a more modern digital 7-Day
Programmer um in place of one of these mechanical clocks and you can save a significant chunk of energy because particularly outdoor lighting it’s usually very high powerered sort of we’re talking a couple of hundred watts per fitting um and so so definitely worth considering um so jumping now into I’m just going to
Check the time actually oh we’re okay so we’ll talk now a bit about heating ventilation air conditioning or or HVAC for short um it’s some of some elements of this people will be pretty familiar with specifically the heating side of it but the the ventilation and the air conditioning is something that is
Usually left to to experts to understand but it’s there are things to consider that don’t need a great level of experties um to make improvements to and so um in general there’s some things to consider with these sort of systems um I recommend that somebody in in your
Company takes a look at least once every six months at things like the time settings for heating ventilation air conditioning and and the sort of temperature set points that the that they’ve been programmed to um the reason I say at least once every six months is especially where
There’s Heating and Cooling in a building you have a heating season which usually starts around October and ends around March or maybe April uh um and conversely you might have a cooling season which covers the other half of the year and so these Heating and Cooling SE
Seasons run for half the year and if you don’t check the pro the settings at the start of that season you could be you could incur Cur significant energy waste throughout That season and so um it’s There’s an opportunity to to revise the set points and programs before the heating or
Cooling season each year so that you don’t um so you don’t end up hitting yourselves in in the wallet um but by by having inappropriate settings um when you do review these sort of settings it’s uh there’s some things to check um specifically have a look to see if the
Previous settings have been checked changed at all um it’s really common especially if you have something like a thermostat in an office uh really common for these things to be changed a few times a day even and the original intention of the system could be could have been completely um overruled or
Overridden by by individual preferences um but it may be the case that the the time programs that were set are no longer appropriate um if uh shift patterns have changed or the the rooms that are used regularly have have changed Perhaps Perhaps entire offices have been sort of mothballed because people are working
From home more for example um the the program the controls and the the sort of time settings and things they they should be obviously adjusted to reflect that new usage um but it’s uh it’s something that’s often just completely forgotten about um even where a space is in use it worth
Just canvasing the aigion of the occupants of that space to see if in general people are comfortable um usually it’s got to be done sort of democratically because everyone feels a different level of comfort for any given temperature in a space but um canvas opinion just to see
If people are comfortable in terms of the temperature in a room um and it might be that people find that it’s far too hot or the or it swings from one extreme to another um or too cold when the air conditioning is on and um so that there could well be some potential
Energy savings there by just being more um conservative with the with the settings of those systems um it to go to go a step further um there might be some Energy savings possible based on the some data Gathering that is carried out so you can do some simple logging of the actual temperatures
Humidity levels CO2 levels in a space over a reasonably long period just to just to verify that the controls of these systems are delivering what they’ve been told to do so it’s possible that you might set a room to 20° but it’s actually um there’s actually sort of a
Discrepancy between the set point and the real temperature so verify that a that a room is getting to the temperature it temperature it’s set to and how long it takes to reach those kind of temperatures um so in other words to see if they’re getting to the temperature
You want them to at the time you want them to um it’s excuse me the uh the time it takes for a building to get to the temperature it’s set to can then be used to determine the time that the heating or cooling for that matter needs to be
Switched on at so you can set you can if a room takes an hour to get up to temperature then you probably need to set the heating to come on an hour before the buildings the space is in use but similarly um when people all go home at the end of the
Day it’s not you could be missing a trick by switching the heating off at that time um if if a building or an individual office or room room if it cools down quite slowly then it it’s very reasonable to switch the heating system off in advance of the end of a
Certain work shift so you might be able to switch the heating system off say an hour before everyone goes home because by the time they do go home the buildings just cooled down to the sort of the minimum level that’s acceptable um and an an hour of heating
Um um is it can be quite a significant saving each day um easily kind of 10% of the energy consumption from heating so uh yeah certainly worth considering doing that and that that’s usually best done after taking a recording of the temperature over time so that you uh you know exactly what you
Can get away with doing um if you do have Heating and Cooling uh heat as or Heating and ventilation or or Cooling and ventilation in a building these combined systems could be po they there is the potential that they work against each other so an obvious example is if you
Have a boiler fed radiator system in a room as well as air conditioning um if they’re both switched on so you got Heating and the air conditioning um on at the same time they are likely to work against each other if they’re not set up properly so the heating is heating up
The space and the co cooling system thinks hang on this is getting too warm um better start cooling the place you’ll end up canc they’ll end up canceling each other out and just just throwing energy away and it sounds like an absolutely stupid thing to do but it
Happens all the time um it’s even happened in our office um once or twice um just because um these systems don’t always talk to each other and if if they are being sort of fiddled with multiple times a day by the the occupants in individual spaces it’s just a matter of
Time before the the these uh interventions kind of conspire against each other so you don’t necessarily have to lock people out of fiddling with these things but just somebody needs to just check that the systems are kind of working together rather than against each
Other um to get a bit more into the kind of data analysis side of things um with heating in particular um it’s worth measuring consumption um even just by looking at energy bills so usually it’s going to be uh gas bills for a building check the monthly consumption against what’s called Energy
Benchmarks so buildings of Any Given type you can use usually be matched up to a specific energy Benchmark which G which is measured in terms of kilowatt hours per meter Square per year of fossil fuels or electricity um so um offices schools hospitals factories theaters they usually they all
Have um these statistical average energy consumption figures which you can then measure yourselves against and if you are consuming more energy per meters square per year than the Benchmark it might indicate that you’re not as efficient as you could be um if you have if you want to go even
Further you can check if energy if Heating and Cooling are being controlled appropriately um by looking at something called heating Degree Days um we don’t really have enough time to go into that in detail but basically it’s a measure of how often and by how much the the the
Weather Falls below the temperature at which your building would need to be heated and if you with a with some data analysis you can see how well your heating consumption uh responds to changes in temperature over a year and if it’s well controlled there’ll be a really strong correlation between energy consumption
And outdoor weather and if it’s poorly controlled then the correlation um is less good or there may be no correlation if there’s if there’s really poor control and that kind of assessment can indicate if there’s some improvements that can be made to the controls of your heating or in some cases cooling
Systems um and very simply finally um on this slide it’s almost a cliche but just consider reducing the heating set point by just one or even or two degrees um and that tiny little change which is almost in perceivable to to most people can have a really noticeable impact on
Energy consumption so uh a one or two degree do drop um it really can save 10% of your energy consumption so if you can get away with it then absolutely do that um just um yeah so so that’s uh that’s the some general points for heating systems but
Um getting into some more specifics um talking about simple improvements in terms of lagging of pipe work um the again this is something that can be done by non-sp specialist lists very often um unless it’s a sort of a a really sophisticated commercial plant room but um it’s really
Common when you go into a boiler room to find there’s lots of pipe work that’s not insulated properly um and it’s uh it’s one of the worst places to have uninsulated pipe work because boiler rooms in particular are usually very very highly ventilated um where there’s a commercial boiler because they need
Firstly they need air to mix with the fuel to burn properly but also the ventilation is to get rid of anything like carbon monoxide that might have collected if the if the boiler is not operating properly so it’s a it’s a safety issue as well but um the the
Effect of having that much ventilation in in a in a boiler plant room um is that the the space is effectively Outdoors um the the air is the indoor air is mixing so so quickly um with the outdoor air that the that you’re basically exposing the any unliked pipe work to the outdoor
Air and if you imagine the sort of temperature of the outdoor air um versus the temperature of the pipes there’s the the heat lost to that air can be huge and so as an example the graph here that you can see it shows the for any for a given size of
Pipe work um along the the horizontal axis it shows the amount of heat that’s lost um per meter of that pip workk um and the the different lines are for different um different temperatures different temperature differences between the pipe and the surrounding air and it’s typical for a
Plant room as I say effectively exposed to outdoor we outdoor air you might have 70° uh pipe temperatures and 15° air temperat um that’s uh that represents a 55° temperature difference between the pipe and the air and that that is represented by the top Gray Line in this graph and
So if you have kind of a commercial pipe work system around 50 75 millimeter pipes um you’re going to be losing uh around 150 watts per meter of uninsulated pipe and so it’s quite conceivable that you’ll have 10 or 15 Metter of this pipe in a plant room and
If it’s unlagged that it it’s basically equivalent to a decent Siz radiator just kicking out heat effectively outdoors and so you can imagine the amount of uh the amount of energy waste through that um through that situation is really quite significant imagine instead of that you you literally install a radiator on an
Outside wall how much energy you might be wasting and it’s it’s basically the same thing and adding some lagging to pipe work it’s not always something that you need to get a contractor into do if uh if there’s somebody responsible for facilities on site it’s kind of thing
That can be done uh very very cheaply or even without any sort of skilled labor so even even pipes that are in the indoor space the heated spaces if they’re unlagged it represents um heat loss that’s completely uncontrolled so if a boiler is running but a particular room doesn’t
Have its radiator switched on the pipes feeding it will still be hot and so they’re they’re giving heat into a room that doesn’t require it um and so entire sections of buildings can be can have the heating switched off but the pipe’s still hot um and so without
Lagging those pipes it represents a huge source of energy waste or at least lack of control of the heating system um any pipe work that is out of sight particularly above ceiling tiles or in roof spaces is often left uninsulated and those spaces are not um
Classed as part of the part of the the heated space and so um without lagging those pipes it can be a huge source of energy waste um above ceiling tiles it’s really common that there’s uh openings in the walls um at the sides of those spaces to let pipe work in or to
Ventilate them for some reason and so again the the outdoor air is circulating really well around those pipes and the energy the heat loss therefore can be really really high and because it’s out site it’s often out of mind so if anyone’s doing a site energy survey it’s
Worth just where where it’s safe to do so just poking head above um ceiling tiles or into a loft space just to see if there’s any exposed pipe work like that um I mentioned radiators being switched off um the the thing it’s very very much the case that most
Radiators have a thermostatic radiator valve um if there isn’t one on a radiator then absolutely install a thermostatic radiator valve so that you can control automatically control the amount of heat they put into a room but just because there is one installed doesn’t mean that they’re doing their job properly um over
Time it’s really really common that those valves stick the the little actuator pin that uh that controls whether or not the radiator is being heated um they they can stick open or they can stick closed but if they stick open then e then then adjusting the temperature setting of
Those valves isn’t going to do anything um it’s really common in a room that’s been sort of neglected for some time to have the radiator sort of nominally switched to the off position but they’re still blasting out heat and that’s that’s a case of of that uh valve being
Stuck in the open position and it might be that the that that valve just needs um somebody to come along and and physically uh physically activate the the valve to unstick it or the valve head might need replacing but it either way it’s it’s either zero cost or very
Low cost to improve it and and it can save particularly in a room that isn’t in use um it can save a huge amount of energy because it can be the difference between a radiator operating at full blast or being Switched Off um and so there’s a it’s another
Thing to to consider during a a site energy survey just just to verify that those valves are actually working properly um so we’ve talked about heating systems but um another related area is domestic hot water so the the hot water that comes out of TAPS and showers um it’s usually a smaller
Overall energy consumption but it’s quite often the source of a lot of unnecessary consumption as well particularly in larger commercial buildings where they have what’s called a secondary circulation system um if you if that’s not something you’re familiar with basically you you will have experienced being in a building where
The hot water tap is a long way from the boiler or the cylinder and it takes an age for the hot water to come out of the tap um to avoid that happening in larger buildings they it’s common to have this Loop of pipe work around which hot water
Is being continually pumped so that there’s only a short distance from that Loop to the to the actual tap or shower Outlet um so that for the convenience of people in the building the hot water is readily available without having to wait for it to to come through um so it’s a
Really nice convenient thing to have but it as you might imagine that Loop of pipe work is nowhere near as well insulated as the cylinder it might be coming out of um if if it even is insulated um it’s really common to find these secondary circulation systems have no lagging on
The PIP work um either in the plant room or around the rest of the building I’ve seen literally hundreds of meters of unlagged secondary circulation pipe work that is just absolutely bouncing Le hot um and it’s often it’s often hidden away way again above ceiling tiles or in Loft
Spaces um so it’s again out of sight out of mind simply lagging it will save a huge amount of energy because it’s constantly being kept hot by by the pump that circulates that water around um so the first thing to do with this situation is like the pipe work but also
The pump that runs that that sends the heat around these these pipes it’s quite often running 24/7 so that heat is always available at the Taps but it’s entirely unnecessary to have that pump running out of operating hours of the business um so in in the simplest thing
You can do to improve that is to have some kind of time switch on the pump so that it’s it’s set to only run when people are going to be using the building um and that can save literally thousands of pounds just by by not allowing heat to be drawn out of the
Cylinder um when it’s not required also you’ll save more energy from the pump itself because that uses electricity to operate you might be able to you might be able to literally half the energy consumption of that pump um by by putting in an appropriate timer switch um but even further you can
Replace the pump with some with a a modern energy efficient one um that can can have it speed adjusted according to demand and so if the if the temperature of the pipe is not dropping then that indicates that there’s no hot water being drawn from
The Taps and so the pump can be a modern variable speed pump can be combined with a sensor that that just ensures that the temperature is maintained um and and that can therefore vary the speed according to how much heat is actually being drawn from that system so there’s there’s quite a lot
Can be done there and none of these things are particularly expensive to do um you may need to get a heat a heating engineer in to to do things like replace pumps um or put timer switches in but um and it’s it’s worth noting that uh hot water
Is uh not to be taken lightly um there are there are the risks of scolds from hot water systems and exposed hot water pipe work um anywhere where hot water is stored is a potential source of uh Legionella risk if there’s water being held at sort of tepid
Temperatures for long periods of time so it’s definitely worth getting things like that um assessed by a professional um usually doing things like lagging hot water pipe work is pretty low risk but anything to do with the control of a system needs to be done by somebody that
Understands the risks and know knows how to operate and and work in those kind of environments um this is a bit of a sort of a a counterintuitive thing to consider but in buildings where there’s really long runs of hot water pipe work to the outlet um potentially so if if there’s a
Boiler room at one end of a building and a hot water Outlet at the other end of a building there could be a huge amount of heat loss just in the pipe that takes the heat from one end to the other um and so although something like a gas hot
Water system is comparatively pretty cheap per kilowatt hour of energy compared to something like an electric hot water heater um the fact that a that that sort of situation can lose so much heat to the environment through the pipe work means that the alternative option of putting a
Simple electric water heater at the point of use that it can actually be it can actually be significantly cheaper to do that than than to send heat all the way from the boiler to to where it’s needed um also you in some situations you might be filling a you might you might be
Heating up an entire 100 or 200 liter hot water cylinder just to provide hot water for the for the short amount of time it’s needed uh the other end of a building and so they it’s so in that kind of situation you’re you’re heating up far far more
Water than is actually needed for the for the demand and so something like a small point of view electric water heater can be tailored to the demand a lot better and so the although it’s more expensive per kilowatt hour the number of kilowatt hours use can be much much
Lower by that setup um so there’s it’s a bit counterintuitive but in some situations it’s probably worth considering um again to reduce the actual amount of hot water needed it’s worth installing things like self-closing Taps the sort of the the the push to open type Taps um and put
Low flow um tap heads in to reduce the amount of water flowing out of them they usually marketed to save water um in terms of to reduce the number of liters of water that you’re actually using but if you’re reducing the number of liters of hot water you’re also reducing the
Amount of energy consumed and so it’s worth considering installing things like that in any hot water taps um again a very simple measure costs nothing but putting some kind of signage um where there is a hot water tap to to advise people not to leave the
Taps running um to question if they even need to use hot water um just keeps things keeps Energy Efficiency in the mind of occupants um and can have a much bigger effect than than than you might expect um and it’s not it’s not simply the case that for example reducing the
Fan speed by half reduces energy consumption by half there’s actually a like an exponential um relationship between fan speed and energy consumption so you can see here um increasing a fan speed by 26% actually results in a 100% increase in power consumption or energy consumption um conversely reducing the
Speed of a fan by just 21% will actually half its energy consumption so in other words um the fan speed if you if if you double a fan speed you’ll actually um you’ll actually increase energy consumption by eight times there’s a it’s not even a square relationship it’s a cube relationship
Between those two um values and so they just a modest changes in fan speed will have a huge effect on energy consumption so um if it’s possible if if you’re looking at um upgrading uh he uh ventilation system getting some sort of automatic control with variable speed fans will
Definitely save a lot of energy um moving on from ventilation um just briefly to air conditioning um it’s increasingly common in this country to have air conditioning in buildings um for two reasons partly climate change um temperatures are getting higher um particularly in the summer in the UK but also the there is
There’s been a trend to have more and more electrical equipment in buildings than than there were historically particularly particularly in modern offices you’ve got so many computers printers um other electrical devices um for either for either function for either productivity or just uh convenience or luxury um the amount of electrical it
The number of electrical items in most buildings is much higher than it used to be and all electrical items give off some amount of heat um it’s more obvious with things like printers and photocopiers but collectively the amount of heat given off by electrical equipment has gone up a lot over recent
Years and the that is often combed with air conditioning um but before anyone installs any new air conditioning or switches the cooling on in a building it’s worth considering is it even necessary are there other ways to to reduce the temperature of the air in a
In a space other than just switching on cooling systems um firstly so so another reason why cooling is is becoming increasingly common particularly in modern Office Buildings is the amount of glazing that is used in the building’s construction um it’s you can imagine if you’re sitting in a
Greenhouse um in summer you’re going to get uncomfortably hot and that’s not too far away from what some buildings are like in summer there’s the that amount of glazing will cause a huge amount of a huge level of temperature gain when the sun’s out and the the sort of the
Default solution to that problem is to to switch some air conditioning on but um much cheaper much more energy efficient option is to Ru the amount of sunlight getting into the building in the first place and you can simply manage that by putting something like uh solar film on the outside of
Windows it’s almost unnoticeable but it solar films are designed to reduce the amount of infrared light getting into a space um so you’ll still have a decent amount of daylight but the amount of heating from that sunlight can be reduced by by sort of up up to 80% I’ve I’ve
Seen in some cases um and so if if youve if you are in a space where there’s a lot of glazing particularly south facing glazing and it gets it gets too hot in the summer rather than using air conditioning um consider something like solar film which is pretty low cost and really really
Effective and it’s much more effective than having blinds on the inside of Windows because um uh something like a roller blind when it’s closed the sunlight is hitting that blind and heating up um once the sunlight’s gone through the glass it’s too late effectively you’re you’re already the the energy is already
Inside the building so stop stop the sunlight getting in um getting through the glass um with something like a solar film is the right way to go um other options in that alternatives to air conditioning um you can use ventilation at night time when it’s colder to cool a building down this is
Especially effective if the buildings made of of heavy construction so it’s got a lot of concrete or brick work in it because that that extra mass means that it takes quite a long time for a building to heat up or cool down and so if so so there’s quite a lag between
Putting heating or cooling into a building either intentionally or unintentionally from things like sunlight um and and the benefit of that is that if you ventilate a building either naturally or mechanically overnight you’ve effectively got a cold storage battery in the form of all that thermal mass in a building that will
Take quite a long time to uh to be used up and so you so it’ll kind of moderate the temperature throughout the day um if it’s been allowed to cool down overnight and uh that’s virtually free a free form of cooling and and it’s is in fact called Freight cooling because it
Doesn’t require any actual Refrigeration um another way to minimize the need for air conditioning is to um allocate spaces specifically for equipment that kicks out a lot of heat rather than having that equipment spread around a building so printers and photo cop for example can have a dedicated um room um
In a much smaller space so that there’s a lot lower Air volume that needs cooling or ventilating um rather than have so if if you have a large office open plan office you don’t need to cool that entire space to combat the heat output of that equipment um if it’s in its own
Dedicated smaller room um and similarly server rooms um it’s really common to have servers in a dedicated room but it’s not and and it’s extremely common to have a dedicated air conditioning system for that Sur server um but it’s not always necessary um it’s really common to have those the air in
Those spaces cooled down to the temperature of like a a beer cell like 10 11 degrees and that’s way way beyond what is needed to to ensure proper performance of the server equipment um most of that kind of equipment runs happily at sort of 20 to 25 degrees and there’s very little
Improvement to be had by cooling the space any lower than that and so in for for certainly for most of the year just using some natural ventilation into that server room is more than adequate um and even if you do need some air conditioning in that space you it
Doesn’t need setting down anywhere below normal room temperature again similarly to ventilation systems or um HVAC in general ensure Ensure that they have been properly maintained regularly maintained is key to their efficiency so where you do need air conditioning um make the most of it and make sure
It’s properly maintained um often again similarly to mechanical ventilation systems the the outdoor units in particular are nearly always installed high up on a wall or on a roof somewhere and so they’re usually completely out of sight of most people in the building um and so they’ll get forgotten about if
There’s not a regular maintenance program in place um and it’s kind of assumed that it’ll just continue to work forever without any um intervention by anyone but again they have uh air conditioning units have heat exchanges with these aluminium fins all over them and they’ll
Get a buildup of dirt and dust and and even things like weeds will grow up around them but Birds May build nests next to them um they they will gather dirt and dust really quickly and if they’re not properly cleaned and maintained the efficiency of them will
Drop off a cliff so getting somebody to look at them at least once a year is really important um and also to make sure that the the refrigerant pipe work that carries the um cooled refrigerant to into the building making sure that that is properly insulated and that the
The lag around it hasn’t deteriorated or been chewed by rats or pecked by birds that’ll that’ll have a really high impact on the performance of the system um there’s actually some there’s actually a law in the UK to make sure that uh air conditioning systems are assessed for their Energy Efficiency so
Any building with more than 12 kilow of comfort cooling is required by law to have what’s called the tm44 air conditioning survey carried out at least once every 5 years um and that should catch things like maintenance issues on the outdoor units but also comment generally on the
Overall Energy Efficiency of the system and so at the very least getting that done um should should pick up on some any any sort of major uh inefficiencies of the system um but that’s it’s not it doesn’t take the place of regular annual maintenance but is a
Useful it is a useful document to get done apart from the fact that you have to do it um very briefly um HVAC systems often have dedicated plant rooms in big build big commercial buildings and there’s usually a panel that looks like this in those plant rooms um something that most
People who aren’t responsible for these systems would never go anywhere near um quite reasonably they they are not to be sort of tampered with without knowing what you’re doing but there are some simple checks that anyone can do to make sure that they’re operating as they’re
Supposed to um and even if you don’t want to press any buttons or switch anything on or off if somebody checks them then at least questions can be raised to to the people who are responsible for them this this picture is a good example so it’s a simple boiler controller panel
Um it just basically shows if a boiler is off or on or if or if there’s a fault but you can see the switch selector switches down the bottom there’s there there’s settings of hand off or Auto and they’re all set to hand and that means that they’re just manually all switched
On all the time whereas they should all be set to Auto if they’re on auto then the time programs and temperature settings can be used to switch the boiler on and off as appropriate but in hand mode they’re just on uh um and so the the energy saving controls of the
System have been completely um Sid stepped in this case and and so the the system is just wasting a huge amount of energy um so if you if you do happen to find one of these panels and you find anything that is switched to hand mode
Or or manual mode or something then at the very least try and ask whoever’s responsible for for running those systems why it’s set that way and and if anything can be done to to make it work in the way it was designed in auto mode um again the you
Can see there there’s a line of fault lamps here um there’s very often what’s called a lamp test switch or button um on these panels and if you if you switch that on it will illuminate all the lights on the panel and any lights that don’t work won’t
Light up um and that can show if there’s any potential for faults not to be identified if the light’s not working um if a system isn’t working say the ventilation system has a blocked filter there would be a fault lamp and if the fault lamp doesn’t work then you’ll
Never know so that’s another thing that you can test without uh without kind of changing any controls or settings um it doesn’t doesn’t have any effect on the rest of the system um so this uh this next few slides is about compressed air um it’s something that will be really familiar
To anyone that works in a factory or engineering environment much less so for anyone that works more in a sort of office or retail environment but it’s such a big significant use of energy in those industrial environments that is worth talking about um for anyone that that does have some sort
Of um involvement in that those sort of sectors um so the main reason they’re worth talking about is that they’re incredibly inefficient um just the very the the very nature of compressing air means that there’s a lot of heat generated um so there there in the in most cases they they’re only
About 10 10 or 12% efficient in other words 10 or 12% of the energy used goes into actually creating compressed air and the rest of it is wasted as heat so the less you I’m sure you can appreciate the less you need to use a compressor the the better
Um because they’re they’re always wasting a lot of energy whenever they’re in use um and very often a compressor particularly in somewhere like a factory there’s usually a sort of a main compressor that is then used to distribute compressed air around the site by a system of pipes and so the’re
And then they’re also so so widely used that they’re they’re they they’re switched on and they run all the time um potentially 24/7 and so they’re they’re usually the one piece of equipment that uses the most energy um in a in a factory sort of environment and also in those sort of
Environments they Particularly in manufacturing and Engineering there’s a lot of dust and dirt oil grease all kinds of horrible things in the atmosphere and compressors don’t like any of that they like clean air um there’s a that as you can imagine because they they they push air through
Them and compress it if there’s dirt in there then it’ll it could um it could upset the whole system so there’s usually air filters to make sure that the air is clean before it goes into the compressor but those will eventually block um similar to the ventilation
Systems we were talking about um and blockages will will make it a a bad problem even worse so if you’re only going to get at best 12% efficiency out of it um just imagine how much worse it is when the air isn’t allowed to properly get into the system in the first
Place um the ongoing air distribution system so the the airlines pipe work around a site that takes compressed air from the compressor to the tools and machines that that use it is something that that um needs to not be ignored as well it’s really common to when we visit a
Site where there’s a compressor that there’s just a deafening hissing sound coming from all sorts of places around the building and that hissing noise is air that’s leaking compressed air leaking out of either either from tools or from pipe work or fittings and usually that doesn’t need to be
Happening but it’s these sort hissing noises are something that in a noisy Factory often will just get ignored and like we said about having a fresh pair of eyes on site a fresh pair of ears is really helpful in these situations because people do over time just become
Deaf to these kind of leaking noises um but getting somebody that isn’t always on site just to have a quick listen they’ll be able to remind people or point out where there is air leaking if it has been ignored if the environment is so noisy that you can’t
Hear air leaking there are relatively inexpensive ultrasonic um Leak Detectors and Ultra ultrasound is really directional um and it can be easily picked up by um by these detectors and can show you in which direction the sound is coming from so you can actually pinpoint
The source of air leakage um and uh they can be quite effective to find them um but overall the if you want to test for General Air leakage in a compressor system there’s something you can do called a no load test where usually out of hours um where you where
Equipment that uses the compressor isn’t running you allow the compressor and it’s uh the pressure storage vessel to continue running um to maintain the C the the required pressure level of the overall system um and so so if you overnight for example if you leave that system maintaining its pressure measure the
Energy that’s consumed over that period and any energy that the system uses when the there is no actual need for compressed air that represents air lost due to leakage because that’s the only way that the system pressure is going to drop is is through air leaks and so you
Can see if there is a problem to address just by seeing how much energy the cons the system is using um through those leaks just going to do a quick quiz question um you’ve already seen it in fact earlier on but now now that you can see
The context um just going to run a quick poll to see how much you think a a fairly modest air leak might cost um per year so if you have a uh for example a flexible hose with a 3 mm split so pretty small split in the in
The hose how much do you think that might cost a business on average per year um there’ll be a poll coming up in just if actually I can’t see the screen there so yep if you if have a go answering that that question there okay so yeah a mixture of responses there
So um it’s actually SEC yeah so most people think ,000 pounds a year um that that might have been true a couple of years ago until energy price inflation went through the roof it’s actually closer to 2,000 a year just for that tiny little 3 mm split in a pipe
Um so you can imagine in a factory where there’s several of these leaks just getting a small almost zero cost repair done it might even be a case of tightening a pipe fitting um so virtually zero cost to fix these leaks can rapidly amount to thousands of
Pounds saved each year and so um it’s it’s one of these things that seems really small but can be it can have a huge impact on on the cost of the energy for a business yeah thanks for that um something that we whenever we do a site
Survey we love to find air leaks because it’s such an easy thing to fix and has such a huge such a huge impact um so just a little bit more on compressors um reducing the overall demand from compressors is the the easiest way to save energy so firstly
It’s really common to find that the set point pressure of these things is higher than any of the equipment that uses the compressed air actually needs um if you can reduce the pressure set point from say eight bar to Seven bar the you’ll you’ll be saving literally thousands of pounds
A year if this if the compressor is used all the time um so carry out a review of the equipment using compressed air and just make sure that it’s not being uh that that this the compressor isn’t set too high for it um again the older compressors or smaller compressor systems they they’ll
Have some sort of drain system to get rid of any condensate any water in the air that’s in the com in the pressure vessel um some old systems the only way to get rid of that condensate was just to open up to dump all the compressed air out of
It and I’ve seen sites where people drain the entire compressed air system on a daily basis just to get rid of any uh water in the system because water is quite damaging and will corrode the pipes and the pressure vessel over time and and could become quite dangerous so
Getting rid of the water is important but um modern pressure vessels should have some sort of drain that doesn’t Quire to vent all of the compressed air out but also particularly with larger systems you can get air dryers which take out the humidity in the air before
It gets into the pressure vessel and so that’s a it’s an important feature not only for the sort of longevity of the equipment but also in terms of Energy Efficiency um so draining the entire system is something to be avoided at all costs because that’s a huge amount of
Energy that could be getting wasted on a daily basis H um finally on compressed air air tools particularly things like wrenches um and and Sanders and that sort of stuff air hand tools in particular they um they’re really traditional really common because they’re so kind of so powerful and and
Portable and they’re really really common in Factory situations but because um things have developed coming quite a long way um with cordless battery powered tools um in recent years that it it might be worth seriously considering not using air tools at all anymore and replacing them with modern cordless
Battery power tools just because they’re so much more efficient um probably safer as well but the um if you if you remember that the a compressor that’s inherently at best about 12% efficient once that compressed air gets through the mechanics of the tool and down the air hose the overall
Efficiency of it is going to be well below 10% um but compare that to a a modern lithium ion brushless motor powered tool the efficiency of that could easily be over 80% and so the energy consumption of it and also they only use energy exactly when it’s needed
As opposed to having a compressor on all the time so the the the Energy savings from those kind of tools could be absolutely massive if if that’s what the compressor is is used for in any particular site um so um coming towards the end of these slides um so
Uh weirdly I’m going to talk about where to start now that I’m coming towards the end of this session but um overall so just some general pointers um try try to take a whole sight holistic approach to energy consumption and Energy savings um so that you can take a more strategic
Approach um dealing with things um in a way that ensures the overall system is is as efficient as possible in in this in the way that we were talking about with the LED LED lighting earlier um taking that wh sight approach can identify savings that you otherwise
Might not think of if you look at things in in an individual granular sort of way um and so to do that car carry out a sitewide energy audit to identify as many opportunities to save energy as possible before you go about implementing any specific one of them um
So you can then identify kind of the lwh hanging fruit the the things that are going to have the biggest benefit for the least investment um and and start with those and then work down to the things that are perhaps going to cost more or have a more modest
Benefit um and develop develop that kind of holistic strategy across the site and that should ensure that you spend money more wisely um and and reduce the ne the need to spend an awful lot of money um early on um and it’s it’s wor it’s also an opport opportunity to get a realistic
Idea of the Energy savings um and by that I mean it is possible that that if you combine certain Energy Efficiency improvements the sum total of the savings from them won’t necessarily be equal to the individual savings from either one of those measures so as as an
Example um you might improve the control systems for your lighting so you could put automatic motion detectors in place and if you use those with the existing low efficiency lighting you’ll get a certain amount of energy savings from them but if you also replace those lights with LEDs the savings due to
Those controls will be reduced because the energy consumed by lighting whenever it’s on is going to be less so um there’s often there you can’t just add up all of the savings of each individual measure to estimate how much energy is going to be saved overall um so it’s
It’s not all good news and but it’s worth understanding that from the outside set um just a few slides um to finish this little session um on some sort of M mistakes and what not to do um a few myths that you you might have heard to
Do with Energy Efficiency uh got quite a few listed here but just to get through the slides a bit quicker um just going to touch on a couple of them I’ve mentioned things like cooling server rooms um but um there’s there’s a few things worth mentioning so firstly destratification funds um sealing funds
As as you might be more familiar with um particularly in buildings or rooms with a really high ceiling it’s quite common to see fans at the top of them and people quite often think that switching them on in summer is a good idea because it’ll create a breeze in the room and
Cool people down but that’s the exact opposite reason of why they’re usually installed and they’re called destratification fans because that’s what they’re designed to do they’re designed to prevent air from prevent hot air from rising and sticking at the top of a building or of a room switching the
Fan on disturbs that um layering effect of uh hot air at the top cold air at the bottom and pulls the hot air back down to to the sort of ground level and mixes it up so if if there’s hot collecting in a building um in summer at the top near
The roof switching those fans on will have the opposite effect on people it’ll actually make it even hotter for them if they switch those fans on so um it’s yeah I’ve seen that quite often um and it’s a it’s a bad idea if people want to
Be cooled down In Summer with one of those fans um just uh picking another thing out here um yeah lighting it’s definitely no longer the case that um it’s better to leave SL switched on rather than switch them off and then on again um when somebody leaves a room
It’s nearly always going to be the case now that whenever somebody leaves a room switching the light off will save energy um it doesn’t require a great amount of energy to switch them back on again like it may have done in the past um um finally just don’t ass assume that
If something has been installed professionally or designed professionally that it is efficient um and similarly don’t assume that service technicians or maintenance Engineers are considering Energy Efficiency when they do their jobs either um a lot of these industries um Building Services um construction things like that they’re very very traditional
And conservative and don’t take risks very often and so it’s often the case that the way things have been done is the way they will continue to be done um and that might mean the opportunities to save energy thata traditionally weren’t considered because energy was cheap um they’re they’re they’re still not being
Considered now so if you do have a concern with regard with regard to Energy Efficiency do raise it with the professionals um responsible and see if there’s anything they can do to uh to improve the situation and try and encourage them to be a bit more uh a bit more Forward
Thinking um finally we to we don’t have time today to talk about uh user Behavior that’s a separate session on its own really but it used it was quite popular quite common to see Energy Efficiency campaigns such as the reminders to switch lights off in in uh
With labels and things next to light switches next to taps um they’ve gone out of fashion and it’s a real shame because they do work um the there’s complex um psychological reasoning behind doing some of this sort of stuff but the fact is that these kind of C campaigns do work um
And consider just doing Simple virtually zero cost things like putting it putting some awareness posters about Energy Efficiency around buildings putting reminders at the point of use for um equipment that uses energy such as near light switches remind people to close doors to reduce a air leakage
Um tiny little simple things like that can just can just nudge staff into a more Energy Efficiency energy conscious way of Behaving um and it’s one of those things that’s very hard to actually measure the impact of but it’s probably worth doing anyway um right I’m just going to show you a
Few slides of examples of what not to do um here’s some air conditioning units um installed outside um to avoid causing an unsightly Isa um they’re hidden away in this little sort of Alleyway Al Cove area but it’s one of the worst places they could have been installed for Energy
Efficiency because there there’s a ceiling there’s a sort of a outdoor cover above them which means that the hot air that they’re kicking out to they’re rejecting heated air or hot air to to provide cooling on the in on the other side in the indoor space and the
That hot air is just going to be collecting in that area he got nowhere to go um and that’s going to make the whole system work far less efficiently they need a good supply of fresh air circulating around them to work properly they’re also blowing at each other so
They’re blowing warm air on each other which is um even worse than than that sort of um stationary warmed air um and they’re therefore just the the almost couldn’t be a worst place to install them outside um the the the only worst thing would be to install them inside
Somewhere um here’s a another example of something fairly silly um this was a a fashion um a fashion design and retail company that they’ve installed they’ve created these design offices within what used to be an open plan office space and you can see the US sort of upvc double glazed
Partition on the right hand side there that’s behind those partitions are where the design offices are and this Corridor is um where all the radiators are from what used to be the open plan office and so there’s I think six six great big double panel radiators there blasting away
Kicking many many kilowatts of heat just to warm that Corridor up and right above them is a load of very very leaky single glaze windows so all of that lovely double glazing on the partitions is providing almost no benefit and all it’s really doing is ensuring that the that
As much energy as possible is escaping out of the building from the corridor um and funnily enough at the same site here is another good example of what not to do so there’s um this is a a well it’s a warehouse um where all of the fashion items are sold and and
Dispatched from um within this space though you can see sort of in the middle of the picture there’s a a single story block concrete block built um internal space that’s been created that’s it’s I think it’s a photo studio that was that’s inside that um it’s got
A sort of a flat roof um built within within the um within the warehouse itself what they failed to do was think about the lighting though um so everything else in the warehouse has been left as it was and if on closer inspection you can see these light fittings that have been
Highlighted they’re all they’re doing is lighting up the top of the flat roof above that photo studio and there I think they’re 400 watts a piece so there’s about as well we worked out about 3,000 kilowatt hours a year in wasted energy from those two lights that
Are doing absolutely nothing um for the people in the building and you can imagine that’s uh it’s going to be about ,000 pound a year that’s being wasted just by not considering things like the the lighting setup when they built that uh new space um so generally decarbonization um
The the general approach should be um reduce consumption first before jumping into more exciting things like renewable energy um it’s the reducing consumption is not something that people get anywhere near as excited about as as fancy new equipment like solar panels but um if you want to have the biggest
Impact for the least Capital cost then this is the way to go um when it comes to the heating or cooling of buildings take a fabric first approach so look at draft proofing insulation maybe glazing before you think about installing something like a new boiler or a heat
Pump um and and also in general decide if you really need equipment if if something is actually essential to the business um are there different ways of providing the same function um in a way that doesn’t use energy much as we considered the the air tools versus cordless power tools there
Are quite often more modern Alternatives that serve the same purpose without using as much energy so just try and think a bit more laterally about equipment and um functions and operations of the business to see if there’s another way of doing things um or that that doesn’t
Necessarily have to use energy in the same way as it might have once um used energy so that’s the end of the quick win session um before we jump into a bit of a a review of some uh Renewable Energy Systems um just an opportunity to see if
Anyone’s got any questions um around or comments around any of the slides that we’ve seen so far e yes yes Steve thanks for that yes the the slides um will be available um to anyone that wants them after this session um also we are going to have there’s there’s something called uh well
On the on our on our bring about website there’s going to be various recordings of webinars and that sort of thing available so uh um you’ll either have access to the slides themselves and or a recording of of this session so yeah um you don’t need to commit any of this to memory
Um I wouldn’t any I wouldn’t Envy anyone that had to try to to keep this in all of this in mind so um yeah thanks for that um we’ll we’ll jump into a um a bit of a session about oops where are we jumped far too
Far ahead in this sorry here we go so yeah renewable energy uh we’ll do a quick introduction AC and talk about the various different Technologies available um the more common and and beneficial ones at least um for for businesses in the UK um you may be familiar with some of
This you may not but it’s going to be a bit of a Whistle Stop tour of renewable energy systems so it’s not so much quick wins but at least if if you really are sort of interested in installing any renewable energy system systems then having a a decent basic background
Understanding of of what it’s all about is a really good starting point and so that you know if it’s going to at least in principle provide you with some benefit or not so we’ll start with the most popular thing um solar photovoltaic energy PV um it’s uh it’s all a range for good
Reason because it’s it’s come down in price so much in recent years the the cost per panel it did go up a bit a few with price with energy price inflation it was so underd demand that um the cost of the equipment went through the roof but it’s come back down
Again now to the point where it’s pretty much cheaper than it’s ever been um and it it’s very very reliable um so and and it’s something and it’s also something that people kind of have a decent uh intuitive understanding of it takes light from the sun turns it into
Electricity uh job done so everyone can appreciate that and understands that it’s providing effectively free energy from the Sun um and most places have some kind of roof space that it might be able to be fitted to um so it and it so it can be applied in the vast majority of
Locations um with a few uh sort of a few factors that might affect that feasibility though um so just in in sort of simple terms just some of the jargon around these kind of systems a solar panel um or solar module is the individual unit that is purchased
They’re made up of solar cells which you can see on in the bottom left of the picture here those are the individual um silicon Wafers that are assembled together with uh metallic uh um contacts between them all um that collectively make up the solar module or solar panel
And then a system a system of a collected set of solar modules um either a rooftop inst in installation or um solar farm perhaps there they all go together to form what’s called a solar array um and you may get a number of individual arrays in any given installation um just depending
On the the nature of the of the site and location that they’re being installed at um so solar solar modules solar PV when the Sun Shines on them they generate electricity and that’s it’s not alternating current that you get out of your power sockets straight away it
Comes out as direct current um and it can be pretty high voltage as well it can be sort of hundreds or thousand of volts coming out of the system um of DC electricity and before that can be used it needs to be converted into 230 nominal 230 volt AC power that you can
That can be distributed around your building and sent to the grid if there’s any extra um and so that that that DC electricity has to go through what’s called an inverter and that that does the job of turning whatever is coming from the PV modules into usable um usable AC
Current um and it’s also the inverter will also sort of synchronize that with the grid so so it can readily be um combined with Grid electricity um or so used on site um in combination with electricity from the Grid or sent back out to the grid if there is any
Excess um just briefly there’s just some pictures to help you understand the the solar array on a roof there at the top there’s some switch gear to to help you safely isolate equipment but on the bottom right there that blue unit that is an example of a I think
Three-phase inverter um the inverters generally look something like that um fairly a fairly Anonymous box on a wall but um that’s doing a really important job of of making the El actually usable um so a few considerations around around the performance um and feasibility of PV um firstly the as you
Might imagine the power generated depends on the amount of light is actually hitting the solar modules um and that is going to be impacted by various different factors U firstly obviously if there’s any any shading on solar modules that will obviously impact the amount of energy that is being being
Generated um but it’s important to know that e that in in a simple standard installation any module that has any shading on it will actually restrict the power output of the entire array because it effectively acts as a bottleneck for all the electrons that are flowing around so avoiding shading of any amount
On any individual module um can have a huge impact on the overall performance of the system unless you have some more sophisticated um optimization equipment um things things like micro inverters or module level optimizers as they’re called um avoiding shading anyway is uh a good
Principle to to go by but also the the overall installation specific such as the angle if it’s on a roof the the direction the roof is facing the angle of the roof pitch itself um could be anywhere from nearly from a flat roof all the way to sort of very steeply
Pitched roof um there’s there’s an for any given location on the globe there’s there’s actually an an Optimum angle for solar modules to be tilted at that matches the kind of latitude that you are in on the globe so around here we’re I forget what we are 55 degrees north or something
Um but as and an angle around around about 40 to 50° is Optimum for this part of the world because it ensures that the sun is at its at its highest in summer is going to be perpendicular to the modules and they’ll be they’ll be able to generate the most electricity at that
At that maximum Point um but you’re not often going to find a roof that’s pitched that steeply um very often particularly commercial buildings have a much shallower pitch roof um factories and warehouses they’ll the roof might only be 5 to 10° um but the actual loss of energy from having them
Pitched at a much shallower angle is actually fairly modest um and the shallower the angle the more um the more sort of smooth the generation is over the year and throughout the day because they’ll they’ll they they’re less um they’re pointing less directionally for a sing for for one
Particular time of day and time of year the the shallower pitch they are the the more they’ll sort of the the more um the the more the less of a peak you’ll get in in generation throughout the day or throughout throughout the year so but some some slope on them is
Helpful though because it allows rain to wash off them and take any dust or dirt buildup with it so it’s called it’s called allowing for selfcleaning so usually that has to be at least um around about 10 or 15 degrees of of slope to to allow rain to wash the modules
Effectively um if you got a plat roof or if you’re thinking of installing modules on the ground um they’ll need some sort of framing system to support the modules at the required angle um there’s various factors to consider in where you do have a a flat roof installation firstly the
The way they’re actually installed on the roof um you don’t necessarily want to start putting holes in a roof covering so there’s the actual mounting um equipment and and attachment method that’s important to consider that can be just weighing them down enough so that they can’t lift up in the wind but they
Might you might um chemically fix them in other words use glues or cement to attach them to a roof in ways that don’t need you to actually drill through um or puncture the roof covering um with flat roof installation the modules are installed in rows on these
Frames that hold them at a certain slope um and but because the because the modules are tilted up from from the horizontal they’ll cast a shadow when the sunshines on them and so the steeper the the slope of those modules the more of a shadow they’ll cast and therefore
To avoid them casting a shadow on the modules behind them the rows of modules will need to be spaced further apart um and so that so you might get more energy overall for a single row of modules tilted at a steeper angle but the amount of the number of rows that you can
Install in a given space will be reduced um to avoid self- shading as it’s called um and so the the steeper you put your mod steeper you pitch the modules on a flat roof the fewer modules you’ll actually be able to install um so that’s worth considering um also the steeper
The angle that they’re tilted at the more the wind is going to catch them and so the they’ll there’ll be higher loads for any given wind speed on the modules if they if they’re tilted up um more steeply from the roof and also they can be more VIs able if they’re tilted up
More steeply um so there’s various things to consider there um and important to at least be aware of these things when you’re um approaching people to to specify a system for you um just to illustrate the the effect of the angle of the uh modules um sort
Of the the compass direction as well as the angle of pitch of the of the roof or the the modules a quite simple uh graphical representation here shows the compass direction that the roof is facing in um for for any given building along the the columns on this chart and then the the
Pitch of the modules down the along the rows um indicated on the left hand side there so the in in this part of the world the optimum is facing due south and modules tilted at 35 40 50 de um that’ll generate the most energy over a year that is possible in in that
Particular location um if as soon as you start turning away from due south the energy yield will be reduced and uh steeper or shallower angle of modules will reduce the output as well but it’s uh it’s worth noting though that um the effect of compass Direction is reduced when the modules are tilted
Less so um for a modest reduction in energy yield that taking it to its logical conclusion if the modules are pointing if they’re flat um hor if they if they’re installed horizontally there’s no effect of compass direction as you might imagine because they’re not actually pointing anywhere they’re just pointing straight
Up um and they but they’re still going to generate 84% of their potential um over the year and so there’s a a perfectly sort of uniform Generation Um regardless of which direction the sun’s pointing at so um yeah it’s it’s useful to to to realize that the direction it’s facing
Is not the be all and end all and there’s different different setups might suit different properties uh different or different activities so if you use this to think about the where the sun’s coming from um if you have a business that operates mostly in the evening it might be worth having the modules
Pointing West even though overall it’s not going to generate quite as much at least the energy is going to be used um because it’ll be generating more towards the in the in the time of day when the business is actually um most active so some quick pros and cons um
Some pros of some some sort of positives some benefits of solar PV is firstly they’re extremely reliable um you can easily expect a 25e lifespan out of the equipment um and even at 25 years it’s modern modules are usually going to still be operating at about 80 85% of their their designed
Performance so they can they can be and and there’s there’s very little maintenance required to keep them running at that level of of performance as well um the the actual energy output of modules is pretty easy to predict um there’s um freely available data on the the amount of sunlight prod um available
In any location in the world over a year and so you can you can quite easily simulate how much energy any given solar system design is going to is going to put out o over a year and so the’re developing a business case for a solar PV system is pretty straightforward in a
Lot of cases um there’s uh pretty straightforward Energy savings to be had so and any kilowatt hour that a solar PV system generates if you use it on site that’s a kilowatt hour of Grid electricity that you don’t need and so um there’s a a pretty straightforward benefit in terms
Of Energy savings from the grid um there’s even if you do generate more electricity that you can use then you can use on site it’s often possible to export any excess to the grid um and you you’re actually guaranteed to get some amount of money from your energy
Supplier um for anything that you do export but it is a pretty modest payment so around 5p in some cases 7 7p or even 15p as as an extreme case um is the sort of amount that you could get paid per kilowatt hour of electricity that you
Export to the grid but if you do compare that to what it might cost for or what you might be saving for anything you use on site which could be around 35p on average for that’s the amount that you would otherwise be paying per kilowatt
Hour from the grid you can see that it’s best to to consume as much of that energy on site as possible to get the maximum Financial benefit um other Pros it’s a very mature technology now and the supply chains are very mature um equipment and installers
Are uh very very common place um there’s there’s very healthy competition to to ensure that you’re getting the best price for systems very low technical risk it’s a it’s a proven technology and as I say the capital costs are an all-time low now um uh I mentioned battery storage at the
End of the list of Pros um in some cases well they can be combined with battery storage systems which might maximize the benefits um in terms of the amount of energy you consume on site um but there are some disadvantages some sort of uh some sort of negative um factors to
Consider um firstly the electricity that’s consumed or demanded by a site doesn’t always match when solar PV is able to generate electricity so the the time of generation does not always match the time that the the energy is demanded and so it’s yeah in other words solar PV is is is
Intermittent um and it’s not always possible to perfectly match the availability of the sun with the energy that’s needed um so you will ultimately end up exporting some energy at a fairly low Financial benefit some of the time in nearly all cases um roof structures are not always
Suitable for the additional weight and wind loading from solar PV system so it’s uh It’s always important to carry have a structural assessment carried out on the roof and that is it can be an additional cost um or it could it could make the whole thing in unfeasible if uh
Structural upgrades are needed to a roof um there are some planning restrictions on solar PV systems um it’s important to check with your local planning department what is and isn’t um allowable in terms of permitted development or oops excuse me or what you might um need to do in terms of a planning
Application um and the one of the sort of the main restrictions these days on the feasibility of a solar PV system is the local electricity grid uh and its capacity for taking exported electricity from the PV um there aren’t very many places now where there’s a lot of
Capacity to spare on the electricity Grid in this country so um there’s actually a requirement to apply for a connection to the grid for any system above 16 amps per phase so if you’ve got three-phase electricity Supply basically anything above 11 Kow needs you to apply
For a connection to the grid for for for whatever it is that you want to install and that can take uh 3 months to get an answer back and the answer might not be yet yes you can do it it might be no it’s just not happening or you can do it
But only this reduced size of system is feasible um or they might say yes you can do it but it’ll cost you so much money to upgrade the Grid in the local area so um you can’t assume that a system is going to happen until the grid the the local distribution Network
Operator which in our area is Northern power grid the system isn’t feasible until they’ve confirmed that you can connect to the Grid in that area um the last point the last disadvantage here is actually I think no longer the case but it it was until quite recently the case that
Um putting a new C putting new capital um investment into a building such as PV would add to the business rates of that property um which is entirely going against any kind of efforts by the government to encourage the use of Renewables um yeah investing in the building in increasing the interest the
Business rates um thankfully I think has been legislated out of out of the business rates um regulations um I’ll just very briefly touch on solar thermal um it’s something if you’re familiar with going to the Mediterranean you’ll see on almost every Rooftop in the UK it’s far far less
Popular it does still it can still be pretty effective in providing um buildings with hot water but um it’s uh it can be quite expensive though so there’s a simple diagram here of a solar thermal system um the panels on the roof they’re called collectors um
They are they’re sort of like a a flat Greenhouse in effect usually there’s a a panel of glass through which the sunlight can can pass but then there’s a a a water fill um either panel or tube behind that glass that’s dark in color to absorb the
Sunlight and heat up um that then has water flowing through it with some antifreeze in it um which takes the heat away from from The Collector and puts it into a cylinder usually to to heat up hot uh water to to then be used from Taps and showers and that sort of
Thing um a couple of examples of installations here there’s on the left hand side there’s some roof integrated solar thermal panels they look pretty similar to solar PV but um these are for hot water um they can the roof integrated version is installed in a way
That is uh the same level as the roof tiles so they don’t protrude from the roof surface much less um much less visible and um and a bit more subtle in terms of the the appearance of them on the right hand side those tubes that’s another type of
Solar collector called an evacuated tube um collector they do the same job but just um arranged it in tube fashion rather than a flat panel um so yeah the in in this part of the world the the solar thermal is much much less popular than solar PV um
Although the the systems themselves are pretty efficient um compared to solar PV the cost of the equipment is really high com in comparison um some in some cases it might work really well anywhere where there’s a really high demand for hot water um very predictable demand for hot
Water especially even through the summer when there’s the most sunlight that’s when it might make sense but um in general because it’s so expensive the savings the Energy savings through having a solar thermal system very often don’t recover the cost that’s initially paid for it over the expected lifespan
So you could be talking 15 or 20 years um payback period for that sort of system um again there’s similar disadvantages that there are from PV things like needing a structural assessment of the roof some planning restrictions um and but and there there is actually also more maintenance
Required of this system it does require somebody at least annually to to check that the system is operating and set up correctly ly um again as I mentioned earlier with hot water there are some hygiene implications if it’s not properly designed and maintained um there’s because anywhere where there’s hot water being stored
There’s a risk of Legionella that needs to be properly understood and uh and avoided um in any way possible um so moving on to to renewable heating options um specifically we’ll talk about heat pumps um I’ve got a little animation here just to explain how heat pumps work um but this is an
Example there’s there’s various different types of heat pump there’s you will have heard the term air source heat pump um and there’s and then there’s ground Source heat pumps and water source heat pumps even but just to to give they all work on a very similar principle um they’re effectively
Designed to take heat from one place and move it to another other place but in that in somewhere during that process there’s a compressor which causes the the temperature to increase um and that’s that’s sort of key to to the whole system being effective and
That that’s why you can take heat out of somewhere cold like the outdoor air and and provide useful heat in a warmer space um such as inside a building so it the general case here is an example of what is called an air-to-air heat pump it takes heat from
Outdoor air and puts it directly into the air inside a building and I’ll just briefly explain how this the sort of basic principle how of how they work so there’s a heat exchanger outside um air is blown over the heat exchanger and on the other side of the
Heat exchanger is a fluid called a refrigerant and that’s got that’s got a a low boiling point below the temperature of the outdoor air and so when the air is passed over that heat exchanger the refrigerant will evaporate and start flowing around the system so as it evaporates it absorbs heat from
The outdoor air um and that that heat is carried away with that evaporated refrigerant it then goes through a compressor and the compressor we we talked about compressors earlier they they the act of compression causes the temperature to increase um which in this case is a good thing um that rise in
Temperature means that when it goes into the when the refrigerant goes into the building the temperature of that gas is higher than the air temperature surrounding it so the the there’s then another heat exchanger inside um which allows the that extra that that high temperature gaseous refrigerant to dump its heat into the
Air via that heat exchanger and as it dumps its heat it condenses back into a liquid it’s still at high pressure though um but it’s now cooler so the the high pressure liquid refrigerant continues on its way round to what’s called an expansion valve where it’s allowed to depressurize back to the
Pressure level that it was originally at so you’ve now got cold liquid refrigerant that is back round to the start of the loop ready to absorb heat from the outdoor air again and it’s a continuous loop that keeps going round and round and round but that’s the basic
Principle of how um a heat pump works and it’s the same processor as a fridge or a freezer but it’s uh flipped around so that you’re benefiting from the heat output rather than the cold side um so that was an airto air heat pump this is an example of an air to
Water heat pump here looks very similar as an outdoor unit looks more or less the same as a as an air conditioning unit and they’re they’re basically the same sort of thing but in the case of an air to water heat pump the heat exchanger and and refrigerant are
Putting heat into the water that feeds radiators rather than going directly to the air inside a building that that’s really the only the only important difference um the the the temperature of the water though that comes out of a heat pump for the system to work efficiently it’s generally considerably
Lower than you might get from uh a gas boiler system for example and so lower temperature means to give a certain power output to maintain uh to maintain the desired room temperature requires um a much larger amount or size of heat emitters so if you if you’ve got radiators you
Might need to double the size of the radiators or double the number of them or use something like underfloor heating where there’s a really large heat emitting surface area so that that lower temperature can effectively heat the space in a reasonable time um air to water heat pumps though then so they have
Considerably this an important thing to mention about heat pumps in general sorry um just go back to this slide they uh ra so they use electricity to operate um to to run the compressor and run the fans um they don’t use heat they don’t they don’t use electricity directly to
Heat the the room so the the the so for every kilowatt hour used to operate the system they tend to shift three or four kilowatt hours of thermal energy from the outdoor air to the indoor air and that that ratio of 1 kwatt hour of energy used to
4 kilowatt hours of heat that’s called its coefficient of performance um and that’s the key to their efficiency compared to something like direct electric heating um so if you’re replacing direct electric heating with a heat pump your your energy consumption will go down by by by that coefficient
Of performance ratio so it’ll be a third or a quarter of the of of your energy consumption and similarly the greenhouse gas emissions will go down by that sort of ratio if you are however replacing something like a gas boiler system with a heat pump the carbon emissions will go
Down a lot um but the cost of running it may not go down as much because gas is traditionally typically much much cheaper per kilowatt hour than electricity and it’s quite likely that gas could be um only a third of the cost of electricity so if you’re if you only
Need a third of the kilowatt hours but it’s electricity it’s going to be about the same price as running as using three times the number of kilowatt hours but but of gas and so the the cost benefit if you’re replacing an efficient gas boiler system might be a bit marginal at the moment
Um so uh yeah the heat pumps if you keep them simple air to water heat pumps can be very reliable um the the key is Simplicity though if you try and introduce other sources of heating like introduce a boiler system if you try and get it to do fancy things with hot water
As well uh or have other features that make it more complicated that’s when heat pumps do become a bit less reliable and hard to understand um but the yeah the technology is very well proven there’s there’s there’s there’s quite a bit of negativity around them in the UK
But they’ve been they’ve been proven for decades um elsewhere in the world particularly in Europe where where the industry is very very mature um and and they they do work if designed and installed properly um disadvantages um otherwise the the outdoor units do Make Some Noise
They’re nowhere near as bad as they used to be but if you’re familiar with outdoor air conditioning units and the noise they make it’s something that should be taken into consideration especially if you do have neighbors that are nearby that might be um that might find that to be a
Nuisance um again the the need the need to install equipment on the outside of a building means there might be some planning constraints um either local um sort of conservation areas might reduce might limit what you’re able to do to the outside of a building for
Example um and the the system is far more sensitive to being sized appropriately than traditional boiler systems um boilers are able to be turned down quite significantly below their maximum output whereas heat pumps don’t operate very efficiently if they’re if they’re forced to operate um much below their designed
Output so um so it’s more important to design them properly and design them well again we talked about PV and how the the electricity grid might limit what can be installed if you switch from gas to electricity suddenly your heating is is going to be putting more Demand on
The local electricity grid so there might in some cases there might be restrictions on how much more electricity you can actually take from the grid to run a heat pump system like that um hopefully that is going to get improved over the coming years um as the grid gets
Upgraded um airto a heat pumps the the diagram the animation that we showed that was an example of an airto aair heat pump basically it’s an air conditioning system but when we say heat when we say air to a heat pump we talk about it’s we’re talking about the the
Provision of heating rather than cooling into a space but they’re basically exactly the same thing and modern air conditioning systems can run in heating mode or in cooling mode um so you you’re probably familiar with what the indoor air conditioning units look like but here’s a couple of examp
Samples a ceiling mounted one and a wallmounted unit um there then it’s a common misconception with these sort of systems that they in most cases they’re not bringing air into the building from outside there’s no ventilation function of them all they’re doing is blowing air over a heat exchanger so taking air in
From the room and blowing it back out again but uh but warmer or cooler depending on how how the system’s operating um similar pros and cons to air to water heat pumps they are usually slightly more efficient than air to water heat pumps um because there’s there’s there
Isn’t that extra stage of having to put the heat into water you’re just directly putting it into the air um so they’re a bit simpler uh and a bit more efficient um again the the running costs though similar considerations to do with whether you’re replacing direct electric
Heating or replacing gas heating um the the this the the cost savings might be extremely um modest if if you’re replacing a gas heating system with air to a heater air to a heat pumps um they’re usually very simple it’s just an outdoor unit connected to an indoor unit via some refrigerant pipe
Work so they can be installed in a multitude of different situations um and the other benefit is of course that they they can provide Comfort cooling um in the summer as well as Heating in the winter um the airto a heat pumps um as you might imagine the cost of an indoor heat
Pump unit is much higher than the cost of a radiator so buildings with lots of individual rooms that might need um lots and lots of individual indoor units could get very expensive so it might be worth in those situations to consider an air to water heat pump instead um but yeah otherwise similar
Considerations to bear in mind as the as with the air to water systems um finally ground Source heat pumps um they used to be quite people used to get quite excited by them um a decade or so ago because they traditionally have a higher coefficient of performance um
Than air source heat pumps because the ground temperature is much more stable and the heat exchange is more effective so so they they traditionally have quite a high quite a High um benefit in terms of the Energy Efficiency but these days compared to Modern air source heat pumps
There’s not that huge a difference but the cost difference is massive um a ground Source heat pump because because the equipment as you can see here it’s quite sizable equipment that’s used um you have to either dig up uh a large area of ground to put in the the pipe
Work that collects the Heat or you have to drill vertical bore holes which are very very expensive thousands of pounds per hole um the overall cost of a ground Source heat pump is very very high especially compared to air source heat pumps um for for only a sort of a modest
Gain in performance so um otherwise because it’s it’s it’s it is at the end of the day it’s another kind of heat pump so some of the some of the benefits are the same as with the other forms of heat pumps such as lower greenhouse gas emissions lower operating costs
Especially compared to electrical heating um very reliable systems as long as they’re kept simple once again but um yeah the other similar disadvantages as well but the major one is how expensive they are due to the particularly due to the ground works that are required um
And and hence there in this country in particular they’re really not very popular unless it’s um unless it’s done on a big scale um but uh yeah so so so that that kind of that really that really is it in that’s that’s a quick Whistle Stop tour of
Um of renewable energy systems um just to give you in a bit of a base level of knowledge if you are considering um any of these large capital projects um doing it properly is the quick win in this situation if you’re committed to installing some renewable energy um
Just being armed with a bit of knowledge is is the way is the way to do it properly and the way to get the most out of it so uh yes that’s uh that’s that’s the end of the slides um and um just wondering if anyone’s got any any
Questions before we close um we’ve got got 10 minutes um before before we’re committed to finishing but um thanks very much for listening um I do appreciate it’s been quite a long session with a lot of information to take on board but uh yeah um if uh if
You do have any questions if there’s anything that you’d like to know then then please do ask um as part of the as part of the the the project that you’ve enrolled in um it is possible to have um subsequent consultations with us um so that there is other support available um
If there’s anything that’s got your that sort of picked your interest if you’d like to know more then just do inquire after this session and would be happy to advise but uh doesn’t look like we’ve got any further questions though so but so thanks very much for for sticking
With us through this um I know it’s a it’s a long session with a lot of info so um hopefully you you manage to get something out of it at the very least um and yeah um looking forward to supporting you throughout the rest of the project though
Great um okay we’ll uh we’ll we’ll depart then but uh thanks very much again and see you again soon