For those of you at the AGM earlier in the summer, you may remember that one of the Directors, Martin Crane, produced some rather stark figures for the heat losses running into thousands of pounds per annum particularly from Estate North – the system supplying the bungalows and maisonettes down the longer heat main. This is a cost the co-op has to bear as we don’t get paid for losses between the boiler house and the RHI meters which is fair enough as far as the RHI is concerned (for anybody reading this blog for the first time, this isn’t about a failure to insulate the heat main, it was a very high spec pipe).
Martin and his assistant had a meeting with Nick Douch recently to look at ways to reduce the losses.
Two actions in particular are being followed up. One it to install a weather compensating controller to lower the district heating flow temperature when the weather is warm, and increase the temperature when it’s cold.
The other is installation of a time clock to allow the DH to the Estate North system to operate a limited number of hours per day in the summer outside of the heating season so that the hot water cylinders are heated up twice a day.
Both these proposals are now being costed and will then be considered further by the Springbok directors in conjunction with Care Ashore and the residents.