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