Chris D’Arcy, Chirpy Heat

Summer is finally here with one of the hottest Junes in a long time. Beach trips, theme parks, and lashings of sun cream in the sunshine are in my near future I hope.

But…. one thing we don’t like to think about in summer is the coming winter. I know I am jumping ahead, like skipping the best scene in a movie, but this is the time to improve things before the cold comes back again and energy prices rise again.

So how do heat networks fit into all this? There are so many heat networks across the UK that are more expensive to live on than they should be.  And because heat networks work so hard in the winter, the relative down-time in the summer is the best time to address these issues.

Did you know that the average efficiency we see is around 40%? This means that on a gas supplied heat network, every unit of heat that a resident uses requires around 2.5 units of heat. If the gas price is 15p per unit say, this means one unit of heat costs 37.5p. Bring that efficiency to 50% and the unit cost of heat comes down to 30p: still not great but would save the average person £300 a year. 

Increasing the efficiency will also lower the likelihood of the system breaking down, having to field the same complaints over and over again, and your customers feeling the cold more than they should.   Fuel poverty has been rising dramatically over the last couple of years. We all have a responsibility to stop this problem from increasing and try to improve things in any way we can.

It is important to tackle these issues head on.  Warmer weather and lower heating demand is the best time to optimise your heat networks.  The first step is to undertake a performance review which investigate the heat network as a whole, including the plant room, the distribution systems, and those lovely places we call home. This will set you on the journey to increasing efficiency, lowering costs, lowering tariffs, keeping you in line with those pesky regulations, getting a thumbs up from your boss, winning the coolest heat network person of the week prize, I could go on but I suspect you already know that.

Get in touch with the Chirpy team at info@chirpyheat.com and we’ll show how we can help you improve things for your customers and your organisation.