heating

The majority of Britain’s tower blocks have originally been designed to provide affordable and safe housing to a large number of residents. With great views and surrounding public open spaces, many of them were created to replace damaged or unsanitary pre-war dwellings, with the aim of modernising our cities and improving the living conditions of many.

However, despite the designers original intentions, tower blocks are now notorious for high energy bills. This is due to the fact that most of these high-rise, multi-occupancy buildings use electric storage heaters that are expensive to run and don’t provide adequate temperature control. This challenge is especially serious in the case of social housing blocks, where residents are particularly vulnerable to fuel poverty.

Fuel poverty is a serious issue across the UK, especially for families living in old, energy inefficient housing. As the temperatures drop and the cost of energy rises, tackling this issue is high on the agenda – and housing associations, among others, are addressing it as a top priority. To reduce costs, an increase in energy efficiency is a must, and action needs to be taken as soon as possible to lift households out of fuel poverty.

Alongside fuel poverty, achieving net-zero is another key national issue. For housing associations that we at Mitsubishi Electric are working with, these heating options are not mutually exclusive. Not only does an implementation of energy-efficient measures reduce operating costs, it also slashes the carbon impact of providing power to tenants.

Leading HVAC manufacturer LG has recently launched a New Build Design Service, to assist new build developers including social housing developers when specifying heat pumps into new homes. In the short time it has been in place, it has already been welcomed by new build developers taking advantage of the new service.
This new service is for developments of 6 or more plots and will provide full designs for plumbing and heating layouts along with equipment schedules that specify the heat pump required, radiator or underfloor manifold heating positions, pipework type and length and controls to ensure that the system which is specified will provide the necessary heating and hot water solution for any house archetype. Furthermore, LG also offers a unique service for CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) analysis, determining the optimal location and performance simulation of the outdoor units.

The 5 year warranty has been extended to cover the Ecocal® Thermostatic Radiator Valves and Ecocal® twin packs, as a testament to their quality and reliability. These join several Thermostatic Mixing Valves (TMVs) and Pressure Reducing Valves (PRVs) that are already covered by the industry leading warranty.

Altecnic, the UK’s leading supplier of hydronic solutions and part of the Caleffi Group, has unveiled an extension to the Caleffi 5 year warranty to cover the Ecocal® Thermostatic Radiator Valves (TRVs) and the Ecocal® Twin Packs.

Joanna Crown, Marketing Director at WMS, leading supplier and installer of underfloor heating systems, has been elected as Chair for BEAMA’s Underfloor Heating Group.

With autumn now our doorsteps, Tom Bowland looks back at a scorching hot summer in the UK and what this means when it comes to overheating and building design.

I’d like to say that as I write this blog in the fading heat of what was a really hot summer, I am sitting in the comfortably air conditioned Mitsubishi Electric offices in Manchester. Unfortunately, I’m working at home, with no cooling other than an open window and plenty of ice cubes in my drink.

Here in the UK, our buildings have primarily been designed on the principle that this is a cold country, leaving them ill-designed to cope with heatwaves. Years of legislation aimed at reducing energy use (with the best intentions) have resulted in air-tight buildings that effectively lock in the heat when temperatures rise.