PRODUCTS AND SERVICES Hidden Costs Of Caring For The Environment

Every care home needs hot water From basins to baths and showers, catering and wash down Most facilities will run successfully on a system based around gas-fired water heaters unless a new build in which case the preference is to move to electric water heating to take advantage of the increasingly less dirty grid This does have implications for running costs with electricity on average costing as much as 3 8 times that of gas So why change things? The simple answer is net zero and the need to be more sustainable Because of the ubiquitous need for hot water which can account for as much as 30% of a building s daily energy demands, addressing how it is secured is one of the best ways of making active carbon savings today

Deploying either heat pumps or solar thermal as a renewable to provision the initial preheat is the most logical approach Where problems and unnecessary costs can quickly arise is when existing gas-fired top up’ water heating is replaced with like-for-like electric which can lead to gross system oversizing Domestic hot water (DHW) systems for

Consort Claudgen s low surface temperature heaters range now includes heaters that are Wi-Fi enabled These heaters connect directly to Wi-Fi and heating can be controlled from the digital control panel on the heater or Consort Connect app Features include a 7-day timer with 24 heating periods per day lock function open window detection and custom automations Users can also view the energy consumption statistics of all connected heaters Additionally, LST heaters with Wi-Fi and occupancy sensor have a self-learning control ability which uses in-built occupancy sen- sors to detect and learn a user’s weekly presence in a room It then creates a heating schedule and automatically warms the room according to the detected or predicted occupancy When the room is unoccupied, the heater will conserve energy by switching to a setback temperature or frost protection mode

BIM objects are available for download from Consort s website 01646 692172 sales@consortepl com www consortepl com

See the advert on page 23 for further informa-