UFH Integration into Renewable Energy Systems

Rod Hickmott is a director of Maincor Ltd., a subsidiary of the German pipe manufacturing group. He is Vice Chairman of the UHMA and he initiated and sponsored both the CIBSE and BSRIA Guides to UFH.

Is it just me, or is there a wider view that our industry is in danger of being marginalised by Government Energy Policy?

Building regulations have become the written form of a politicians ambitions to reduce carbon and energy and the Domestic Heating Compliance Guide is the Government convening the industry to bring it into compliance with those ambitions. What is annoying is the way that work is being distilled into sound bites and who the Government listens to.

We listen to the news and read the press, and the overwhelming output from Government is about energy generation - wind, or solar, or heat pumps, or some other technology that’s waiting in the wings.

In the end this is nonsense, the answer is fully integrated systems that make best use of these technologies to deliver comfort and hot water in our buildings. A heat pump produces low grade hot water; the efficiency comes when that hot water has been used at its most efficient to deliver comfort and hot water.

So why does the Government only grant-aid the generation, why doesn’t it recognise that one form of heating is going to be more efficient than another and back it?

More importantly, when is the penny going to drop that, in the end, it is our industry that is going to deliver the result and, in some cases, pick up the pieces? To illustrate the point, if you look back at the history of underfloor heating, in 1996 it was in the hands of a handful of glorified distributor contractors who told us that underfloor heating was much too complicated for us, ‘leave it to the professionals’.

It took a while for our plumbing and heating engineers to rise up and say that they were the professionals and take back their industry. Now underfloor heating is overwhelmingly commissioned by heating engineers.

Certainly the pipe might be laid by the screeder, the self builder or whoever, but that’s no different to hanging a radiator on the wall. The science is in connecting to a boiler controlling and commissioning; by the time it reaches that stage a heating engineer has his hand in the process.

Underfloor heating is now installed to European harmonised standards and in the UK, the Underfloor Heating Manufacturers Association keeps a watchful eye on the way the industry conducts itself. The ‘black art’ that UFH surrounded itself with, has gone.

As Brian Sensecall, one of our most respected UFH engineers, once said so lucidly, “the difference between art and science is that if it is science you can calculate it!”

In 1997 I sat down with a director of our biggest plumbing and heating merchants who said, “if someone comes to the trade counter he doesn’t know what to ask for and my people don’t know how to advise him, so I can’t see how we can sell underfloor heating.”

This simple articulation of the problem led me to conceive a marketing programme to “take the mystery out of underfloor heating” and put the support in place to enable the installer to see it as what it is – a pretty simple but very efficient and beneficial central heating system. You can at once see the parallels with renewable energy technologies. We need to make renewable part of systems, not think of them as the system.

To develop the sale of renewables we need help certainly, but what people never foresaw is that when that help came in the form of grants we would get the Government involved.

What we need to do is get the Government out of it, so we can get on with the work!

Why is it that certain renewable energy equipment attracts grants, but the complete system does not? There is good evidence that underfloor heating produces significant energy savings over traditional radiator systems:- with a boiler, because a well designed and installed system can keep it in condensing mode longer and with heat pumps and solar thermal, because underfloor heating makes more efficient use of the low grade hot water. The figures are out there.

If the evidence is there, we don’t need grants or some bureaucratic empire builders to tell us we can have the grants – it can all be done with VAT incentives and stamp duty concessions on properties that are energy efficient. No different in effect than lower road tax for energy efficient cars. In the same way, we could use inheritance tax. When a family has invested in energy reduction to a particular level, the property could be exempt.

Similarly with installers, does for example an installer who has achieved the experience and qualifications as an electrician and then passed his BPEC or City & Guilds course to install P.V. need an MCS certificate? Why does it take months to sort out and cost a fortune? If these qualifications are needed and should be exhibited, that’s fine, but it should be enough - we don’t need yet another body draining time and resource out of the industry just because the grants were conditioned to it.

While we’re at it, when is the Government going to realise that Zero Carbon is a meaningless and distracting expression? If we consume energy, we create carbon! Simplify the process, make the right support available to the trade and we can get back to the basics the industry understands - plumbers and heating engineers calling into their local merchants to order the systems they need.

Again, underfloor heating taught some useful lessons, merchants learnt to use manufacturers in a different way. At first, whole systems were delivered on a pallet, manufacturer to merchant, and collected by the installer with designs, quotations and technical support coming from the manufacturer.

Bit by bit, as the merchants and installers grow in confidence and experience, the process of supply is developing and maturing.

The same process needs to happen with renewables.

Merchants and installers need to understand that in the early stages of the process, the sales costs will be higher than for conventional central heating systems and we are not going to be able to sell renewables with the same margins as boilers.

Similarly, the installer must make sure that he gets the support he needs. If the prices get too low too quickly, the quality of that support will be eroded and this will impact on the efficiency, success and reputation of installations. The Builders Merchant Federation and UHMA has convened a process to develop renewable energy heating markets and would like to lobby Government to create the right structures to enable these new markets to grow fluently.

It is to be hoped that Government will see the sense in the process and instead of waiting for the call, will actively join with the BMF and UHMA to develop the rate at which renewable energy solutions move through the market, because the rate at which we are impacting on our overall housing stock now, is pitifully slow. Organisations like the UHMA have worked, not only with the BMF to market underfloor heating with renewable, but also with bodies like CIBSE and BSRIA to develop the engineering integration. If Government plays its part and supports renewables, only as part of complete systems, we might actually get somewhere in developing volume, achieving energy reduction and, in the process, we might even get a better way of living!