domestic heating
WMS underfloor heating is proud to announce its involvement in delivering national housebuilder Bellway’s latest carbon reduction research project, The Future Home @ The University of Salford, which aims to address domestic energy efficiency challenges by putting low-carbon technologies to the test.
The developer’s experimental eco home has been constructed within one of two environmental chambers inside Energy House 2.0, this collaborative project between Bellway Homes and other partners, including The University of Salford, Barratt Developments and Saint-Gobain.
Energy House 2.0 is a unique £16 million research facility, part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and is playing a pivotal role in accelerating the progress towards low carbon and net zero housing design and builds.
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.
Mainstream media has been buzzing these last few weeks with stories about households being forced onto prepayment meters because they have been unable to pay their bills. British Gas has come under particular fire due to employing bailiffs who have allegedly used threatening behaviour to enter people’s properties and install prepaid meters.
This has generated a lot of negative reactions - and understandably so. People are being expected to find sometimes hundreds more pounds a month from incomes that have not increased in line with inflation, to cover household bills and everyday shopping essentials, the costs of which are spiralling out of control.
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.
Electric heating is continually becoming an increasingly viable option for heating properties in the UK. New Government legislation heralds a change in how SAP determines a properties ERP Rating – to almost the same as gas. This change allows widespread use of electric radiators and electric boilers, which are widely understood as having low installation costs, no flue requirement, low maintenance, rapid heat up times and high efficiency. This modern method of heating is shaping up to be a popular choice for the future of home heating within the UK.
Electric Heating Systems are 100% efficient at the point of use. If you pay for 1kW of electricity, you will benefit from 1kW of heat. This is much higher than alternatives which can lose heat through flues etc. When paired with solar PV panels, efficiency of electric heating systems improves, and the carbon dioxide produced reduces.
Supporting the industry to reach its sustainability goals, WMS underfloor heating has released new findings which reveal that underfloor heating systems are 93% less carbon intensive than radiators.
This staggering statistic has been calculated by considering a variety of figures, including product lifecycle, material volume and the carbon impact to manufacture each product, which highlight that plastic underfloor heating pipe is significantly better from a carbon point of view to produce when compared with steel.
The foundation of this calculation is Government published statistics relating to the carbon impact of manufacturing building materials. The report[1] states that the manufacture of iron and steel products have a 7.1 MTCO2e (metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent), compared with plastic products which have a 3 MTCO2e - 58% less than iron and steel.