Our ethos – The Whole System Approach

So now, as promised, I am going to be spending the next series of blog posts going through our ethos of the Whole System Approach. This time of evolution for our company has stemmed, particularly from my personal experience, from not being taught my industry in enough depth. Sure, I served an exceptionally good apprenticeship which set me up nicely for my working life. But as my experience has grown, I came to realise I did not actually know my industry to the level I should and wanted to. It struck me that I (and I think 90% of all other gas safe engineers) had only ever been taught in depth what we needed to be taught to pass safety exams. Which is great and safety is number 1 of course. But no real time had been spent really learning the technical ins and outs of system design and how to get the most from heating systems. 

We are considered plumbers by most, but I can now say with an enormous amount of confidence that we are EXPERT engineers in our field and I absolutely consider us to be a step (or many if I am being biased) above our competitors locally with the quality of technical work we deliver. We have invested an enormous amount of time, effort and money in to our reading, personal research, attending courses and seminars, not to mention the amount of money we have then invested as a result in to researching and purchasing the very best products and tools to aid us in this journey. We love what we do here at FJM and we really enjoying bringing our expertise to our customers and then getting the positive feedback where our customers know they have just had an incredibly special job completed.

So, without further ado, lets start at the beginning with heat loss and the associated calculations. Heat loss is a natural process in our homes and particularly when it comes to The Whole System Approach, it forms the basis from which we work. Simply put, performing heat loss calculations is the method we use to determine how quickly heat can leak out of our homes. Houses, depending on when they were built, are built using a variety of different methods and materials. Each of these methods and materials affect the rate at which heat transfers through them. 

For example, a garage is usually built using a single ‘skin’ of bricks and is an uninsulated space, it has a very thin metal door with gaps around it. So, a garage will allow heat to escape extremely quickly and will not keep any heat in at all for a significant length of time. 

On the opposite end of the scale we have houses such as eco-build homes. These are generally built using the latest materials and technologies so the walls can be up to 50cm thick and combine aircraft grade insulation, air gaps, vapour barriers and aerated blocks, windows will be triple glazed and composite doors will be used. All in all, we have almost airtight homes which have incredibly low heat loss values.

Taking these two simple scenarios we can see the garage would need a huge amount of energy to maintain a warm environment, as the eco build home will require very little indeed. For each material used in a building, we have a set of figures called U-Values which tell us the rate of heat transfer through that material. The lower the U-Value, the lower the heat transfer, the cheaper it is to heat that space due to a lower heat input being required. Low U-Values are what should be strived for when building homes or even improving our own homes. Unfortunately, not enough is done through regulation in this country so even new build homes still have a relatively poor performance when it comes to heat loss. And given the materials and cost of these materials we have readily available, I struggle to see why we do not have better new build housing stock. This is one of the most important ways to tackle climate change after all. But hey, just my opinion, I am not a politician, or a builder for that matter.

Now transferring this knowledge to what we do within our ethos………. When a customer calls and asks for a new boiler, entire new system, adding radiators to an extension or even just replacing a radiator, we will always produce a heat loss calculation for that room or house based on the room temperature required for individual rooms. The process can take up a good few hours of our time but it ensures quality and rules out any guess work in the rest of the process.

We measure every room, so we have the room volume and the area of the walls, floors and ceilings. The composition and materials of each of the walls, floors and ceilings is confirmed so that the correct U-Values can be obtained. The same is done with all windows and doors in the room too. 

Depending on the room use i.e living room, bathroom or bedroom etc, each room will have a different target temperature to be reached. Living rooms will generally be regarded to require 21 degrees Celsius, as opposed to a bedroom which is 18 degrees Celsius. This can be set by the customer if need be so this can be a flexible figure. But in general, the higher the target temperature, the higher the heat loss figures and thus heat input required to hit that target temperature is also increased. 

The outside temperature, as well as the temperatures in neighbouring rooms and properties also must be considered. As most of you will know and understand, the lowest temperatures we experience here in the south east of England are nothing like what they are in the North of Scotland. Again, these factors must be included to get an accurate figure for a heat loss calculation. The same house will have a far greater required heat input in the North of Scotland purely as it is that much colder to begin with.

There are other factors to be considered on the whole for heat loss calculations, but this gives you a brief insight to the depths we go to. By starting with this process, we can then move on to the next part of the approach. As they say, ‘You can’t build a great structure on weak foundations.’ Performing a thorough and accurate heat loss calculation gives us solid foundations from which to work and produce the correct solution for the end user.

The next step of this process leads us on to the correct sizing of radiators……

How hard can it be???? I know what my heat loss is, surely, I just look and get the radiator which produces this much heat, right?? 

WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tune in next time and I will tell you why the Whole System Approach dictates that we must be almost scientific the whole way through the process.

Be SAFE!!!

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