Featured Article
| Shifting ground |
Unless greenhouse gas emissions from land are tackled, any efforts to reduce emissions from buildings may fall short in attempting to stave off the worst consequences of climate change. Richard Douthwaite explains how, with a little ingenuity, techniques can be applied to dramatically reduce land emissions whilst simultaneously providing new raw material streams and energy source
|
|
Read More >>
|
Latest Blog Comments
Official magazine of Easca  |
|
Page 1 of 5
Buildings that are designed or refurbished to use little energy all too
often fail to deliver the expected performance, if the building
occupants aren’t able to use the building as intended. John Hearne
reveals the crucial role that user-friendly heating controls play in
ensuring that a theoretically low energy building delivers the expected
results.
Heating controls in Ireland, historically at least, meant an on/off switch. More recently, sophistication came in the form of a time-clock which can only be used by people with long nails or tiny fingers. When it comes to energy refurbishment, it’s all about wall and attic insulation, condensing boilers and renewable technologies, but very rarely do you hear anything about the system of controls to tie it all together. And yet, the figures suggest that good, user-friendly controls have the potential to contribute more to energy savings than any other single measure.
Paul Kenny of Tipperary Energy Agency (TEA) points to the strange anomaly that, although domestic lighting controls are taken for granted, we just don’t have the same attitude to the way in which we manipulate the heat coming into our homes. “You don’t come into your house and switch on every light in the entire house with one switch, and all to the same brightness. You put a smaller bulb in one room, then you put a switch in each room, so you’ve individual time control on your lights and the size of the bulb is appropriate to the room you’ve put it in. We just don’t do this with heating controls.” And yet lighting a house doesn’t require anything like the energy needed to heat a house. “I did the maths there today with a home owner who was thinking of putting in good heating controls. I asked him ‘how much is your heating bill?’ He said ‘It’s about two fills a year.’ So I said, ‘Ok, that’s about e1,500 a year we’ll say. Divide that by 200 days, that’s about e7 a day, give or take. He maybe has ten rooms heated, so that’s 70c per room per day. If you think about lighting for one room you wouldn’t spend any more than 10c a day for the most energy inefficient lighting, so heating is seven or eight times more expensive per room in winter, yet we don’t have any control of it.”
Tipperary Energy Agency was one of the three agencies to administer the recent Home Energy Saving scheme pilot, in which grant aid was made available for energy makeovers to 1,500 houses built before 2002. With that pilot now concluded, the data which it has turned up, particularly in the area of heating controls, shows just how far behind the curve the housing stock has fallen. “Turning down your thermostat by one degree is all well and good,” says Kenny, “but 82 per cent of the houses we surveyed didn’t have a thermostat to turn down…You’d ask them do you have heating controls and they’d look at you. Do you have a heating switch? ‘Oh yeah it’s out here,’ and they bring you out to the garage. Controls need to be in the kitchen where you’ll see them every day.” The sample of homes included in the scheme represents a tiny percentage of the total pre-2002 housing stock in the country. Though it is slightly skewed towards rural homes, it’s not unrepresentative of what’s out there. “98 per cent of houses surveyed in 1,500 homes under the pilot did not have a stat on the cylinder,” says Kenny, “so almost every cylinder in the country is overheating.” In the absence of any control on hot water temperature, the water in the tank equalises with the temperature that’s coming out of the boiler. That’s usually 75 degrees, about 20 degrees hotter than it needs to be. From his experience on the ground with the home energy surveys, Kenny has dozens of stories involving poor heating controls, no heating controls and most particularly, bad behaviour. “I was in a house the other day, they had an oil-fired range to heat their water. It was one of these really old wick-type ones. They light the wick in the morning, and off they go to work. The range heated up and heated up all the water. Once the water was hot, it would dump to a radiator, and when that room got too warm, they’d open a window. That is heating controls in Ireland. A plumber put that in and said this is a good idea.”
Like many of our energy problems, this, in part at least, is a hangover from the days when energy was cheap. There are however particular reasons why a failure to deal properly with the control issue is endemic in Ireland. “If you start at the beginning,” says Kenny, “whether you’re talking about homeowners, plumbers, energy efficiency experts, building energy raters, whoever it is; there’s a generally poor knowledge of heating controls…There’s a significant requirement for plumbers to do energy efficiency upgrade training.” He says that this lack is a subset of a more general failure in the building industry to engage properly with energy efficiency. “But whereas new build has come up to speed a little bit, retrofit hasn’t, and nor is your average plumber really up to speed yet.” As with so many of the problems that arise in the construction industry, the issue has its roots in the lack of any building control in Ireland.
<< Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 Next > End >>
|
|
Issue 1, Vol 5 Out Now
The new look issue of Construct Ireland is available now. Click here to subscribe online and have the latest issue delivered to your doorstep
|
