2010 June

The DDA requires public and private organisations to provide assistance to disabled and visually impaired users and employees within public buildings, offices and accommodation. The act requires an effective level of contrast between electrical accessories and the background colour of the wall. A simple but effective new product has been launched by ‘DDA Solutions’. It is available in a range of colours and can be easily and swiftly fitted by a competent operative, therefore cost-effective in labour terms. Full details and ordering is available from www.dda-solutions.co.uk

LUCKINSlive.com, the CIBSE-supported online information services for the building-services industry, is now accessible through dynamic links from Amtech Power Software, Estimation and NES software. This time-saving feature enables users to access relevant product information director from within the software they are using, often with a ingle mouse click.

In many pump systems, more than half the energy used by pumps could be saved by changing to more efficient and correctly sized models with variable-speed capability.

The new CPD reflects the growing use of roof space for siting heavy plant on flat roofs, and highlights the importance of using support systems that minimise risks of leaks and cold bridging. The presentation also demonstrates the advantages of off-site fabrication to reduce installation time.

Airvent, a leading provider of whole-life services and maintenance for life-saving smoke-control systems, reports an upsurge in new contracts and contract renewals. As building owners, facilities managers and other responsible personnel begin to realise the importance of their obligations under the RRO [Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005], more and more are turning to companies like Airvent to ensure their buildings’ ongoing fire safety.

Vent-Axia has been contracted to provide property developer Redrow Homes with its Lo-Carbon Centra extract fan to help meet Levels 3 and 4 of the Code for Sustainable homes. Ronnie George, managing director of Vent-Axia, says, ‘Distributors should now prepare to receive requests for the Centra from contractors working for Redrow Homes. With a portfolio of over a hundred developments nationwide, our distributors should benefit significantly from this partnership.’

Zip Heaters, a market leader in instant boiling water, has launched an updated CPD module on ‘Efficient boiling water delivery in the workplace’. It is designed for architects and specifiers. The programme has been created to offer all professionals involved in building design and specification the opportunity to obtain up-to-date information on the provision of instant boiling water in the workplace.

Building-controls specialist ICS (Eastern) Ltd of Norwich has been awarded Trend Technology Centre status, assuring customers that they will receive a consistently first-class workmanship and access to all the latest Trend products. The TTC programmed is designed to ensure that clients are served by systems integrators that meet the stringent quality requirements defined by Trend.

Supporting building services on flat roofs has never been easier. The new Sure-Foot range provides contractors with a choice of supports for installing building services such as splits, VRF/VRV units and service runs. Choose from the foot-only option to create on-site frameworks or the modular support frames for the complete support solution.

MHS Radiators, one of the UK’s leading suppliers of towel rails, designer and panel radiators, has launched an exclusive web site for trade customers. It gives access to special trade-only products. There are dedicated sections on all the company’s products — including its cost-effective panel radiators, designer models, towel radiators and bathroom radiators, underfloor heating systems and low-surface temperatures.

CIBSE has fully updated its Guide E ‘Fire safety engineering’. Now in its third edition, it includes new chapters on performance-based design principles and application of risk assessment. This new edition has been updated throughout to include BS 9999 and other recent developments.

MK Electric has published the 47th edition of its catalogue in a CD-ROM specification version. It is also available online as a download. Over 5300 products are covered, including technical information for specifiers and consultants. Its scope includes wiring devices to circuit protection and cable management. There are also range highlights for MK’s Ackermann and Friedland sister businesses.

SE Controls, which specialises in smoke and natural ventilation, has redesigned its web site. It covers the company’s wide range of products and services which are combined to offer a complete turnkey solution from initial design to completion and ongoing maintenance.

HVCA Publications has launched a guide to good practice for the installation of fire and smoke dampers (DW/145. It highlights many of the basic principles in the design and installation process, while identifying the responsibilities that attach to the team as a whole.

Thermo-Floor has completed the installation of underfloor heating for nine new 3-bedroom family eco-homes in Bradford. The company worked with Accent Group on ‘The Accent Healthy Home’ constructed to level 4 of the Code for Sustainable Homes.

To provide the same flexibility of lighting control when UK law firm Addleshaw Goddard changed the layout of its office in the City of London from cellular to open plan, a Delmatic open-protocol LON control system was chosen. It provide total flexibility of control for zoning and partitioning and achieves energy efficiency through presence-related switching and daylight-linked dimming. The lighting scheme was designed by Chapman Bathurst Specialist Lighting.

The pumping requirements of the redeveloped Briggait building in Glasgow’s Merchant Quay, are met by a range of Grundfos pumps. This Victorian building was home to the main fish market for nearly a hundred years, until it moved to a new location in the 1970s. Over the years, it fell into serious disrepair.

Lighting in the world-famous Ashmolean Museum, now reopened after a major redevelopment, is controlled by KNX intelligent building technology installed by KNX UK member Andromeda Telematics. The system will save energy and provide flexibility for future changes. It also provided the automatic testing out of hours required for a public building.

The extensive use of renewable energy and CHP will reduce carbon emissions by 15 t a year and energy bills by £8700 for the new 24-bed Malvern Community Hospital, making it one of the greenest hospitals in the country. The hospital will utilise renewable geothermal energy for heating, cooling and hot water. It will also generate electricity using a CHP unit.

The UK air-conditioning marketplace — for manufacturers, distributors, consultants and contractors — has taken a right old battering, no two ways about that as a fact.

Biomass boilers have been teamed up with gas-fired condensing boilers to heat Croydon’s tallest building, the 82 m-high Altitude 25 tower. The boilers were chosen from Remeha’s Gilles biomass and Gas Eco ranges.

With access to the fuel store for a new biomass boiler at Langley Academy in Slough being in a roadway used by the occasional heavy vehicle, Bilco was called in to develop a solution. The company provided two JD-ALH20 floor doors, which were supplied and fitted by Matte Fabrications, to enable easy delivery of wood chips by tipper lorry.

An imaginative solution devised by Vaillant to replace a 30-year-old atmospheric gas boiler in the City of Lincoln Guildhall, a listed building dating back to Roman times, avoided damage to the outside fabric and enabled the existing heating system to be used. The old boiler in the basement was deemed inefficient and replaced by a wall-hung 65 kW ecoTEC boiler.

Energy costs at Castle Howard, one of Britain’s finest historic houses, have been reduced by nearly 90% following the installation of two 100 kW Dimplex ground-source heat pumps to replace the previous heating and hot-water systems. Measurements over three months of operation since the heat pumps become operational in October saw average fuel bills fall from £4690 per month to £644.

Having specified the Zip HydroTap on numerous occasions for clients, ttsp Architects has installed two HydroTaps in its London office to give its 60 staff instant filtered boiling and chilled water for drinks. Zip BC100/125 HydroTaps have been installed on both floors of the Clerkenwell office.

MHS Boilers has supplied 155 of its Nexus district-heating units to new student accommodation at Tottenham Hale in London. Designed to achieve a BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating and housing 687 students, the £53 million development was built by the Unite Group and forms part of the wider Hale Village regeneration scheme.

As part of a major refurbishment at HMS Raleigh, the Royal Navy’s premier training establishment in Cornwall, the domestic-hot-water load has been separated from the heating load and decentralised. This has been achieved using direct-fired water heaters to increase energy efficiency and reduce heat losses from long pipe runs.

A state-of-the-art sports centre at St John’s Beaumont School is the latest of over 700 sports halls in the UK to be heated using AmbiRad’s Nor-Ray-Vac radiant heating system. The new sports centre includes a 9 m climbing wall, indoor cricket facilities, performing arts centre, rowing room and a gymnasium alongside the main athletics hall. A draping system can turn it into a marquee environment for plays and prize givings.

JS Humidifiers has installed three Neptronic SKE resistive steam humidifiers at the Bugs exhibit and invertebrate Conservation Centre of London Zoo. These humidifiers help maintain high humidity around exhibits such as Giant Fregate beetles, Partula snails and colonies of Leaf cutter ants.

Energy-efficient lighting for the new offices of Moore Management in St Helier, Jersey, is being achieved with the help of a lighting-management system from ALC Lighting Controls. Specified by consulting engineers Henderson Green, the system comprises presence detection, timed on/off switching and customisable screen setting. It controls a wide range of luminaires from general office lighting to cold-cathode light sources.

To overcome the problem of corrosion of steel pipework restricting flow to plants in a horticultural nursery, Friatherm plastic pipework has been installed. Toon Nurseries in south-west Derby supplies up to four million young plants to the trade industry each year. The centre was refurbishing the pipework system used to supply its thermabeds with hot water.

Budget hotel chain Travelodge has chosen Lochinvar equipment to supply domestic hot water for its new Clacton-on-Sea Central Travelodge. Close to Clacton pier, this hotel has 57 rooms.

Utility costs at the Apollo Torbay 9-screen multiplex cinema have been halved following a survey by energy engineers from BG Controls and the implementation of a number of enhanced building control strategies. Compared with other equivalent cinemas run by Apollo Cinemas, gas and electricity bills alone for the air-conditioned Torbay cinema were three times greater.

Following a revision of the main plant controls strategy for communal heating systems of Wandsworth Council, AEC Environmental has achieved energy savings of 30%. The approach was based on revising the controls strategy for the main plant to eliminate inefficiencies and ensure a good match of heating supply to demand using AEC’s analytical techniques.

Weatherite Building Services has been appointed by the John Lewis Partnership for a major upgrade of the heating system for its store at Brent Cross Shopping Centre in North London. This store has over 11 000 m2 of selling space across three floors and is undergoing a complete upgrade of its HVAC systems.

The Bloomsbury Hotel in London, part of The Doyle Collection, has installed two more Hi-Flow gas-fired storage water heaters from Andrews Water Heaters, bringing to nine the number installed over the past six years. They supply domestic hot water to 150 luxury bedrooms on eight floors and to the kitchens for the hotel’s restaurant, The Landseer British Kitchen.

WindowMaster is supplying natural-ventilation and control systems to 53 schools in Derbyshire being built in the first phase of a 10-year Building Schools for the Future programme. Derry Building Services selected WindowMaster because it can provide an integrated approach to control of the heating and natural-ventilation systems in the schools. The first three schools in the programme are Springwell Community School, Bolsover School and Heritage School.

A range of fans has been supplied by Air Movement Supplies, part of the Elta Group, for the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban, venue for the semi-final of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. A mix of smoke ventilation and axial fans (with silencers) was supplied for ventilating the car parks and the plant room. Centrifugal fans for the Kruger range were installed as part of the stadium’s air-conditioning system.

When a recently installed Fireray 5000 optical beam smoke detector sounded an alarm at 8.45 a.m. because acetone had caught fire, a sequence of events was initiated that say 10 fire engines arrive within five minutes to quickly subdue the blaze. All staff were evacuated safely.

The Fabbri range of wood-burning workshop heaters from Euroheat can burn the waste wood that is generally available in factories and warehouses. These heaters have outputs from 20 to 410 kW and burn all types of dry wood and secondary waste wood such as broken pallets.

Wago’s BACnet controller is a freely programmable modular device designed to perform a wide range of building-automation and control function — from automating individual rooms through to HVAC systems. It automatically detects all digital and analogue I/O modules connected to the system and generates the proper BACnet objects.

Directly connected kWh meters from Hager meet the requirements of EN 50470-3 MID regulations. This approval is mandatory if the meter is to be used for payment purposes, such as in multi-tenanted offices or retail centres. The range has an accuracy of ±1% and includes single-phase models for direct-connection up to 63 A and 3-phase models for up to 100 A.

Mitsubishi Electric’s Lossnay heat-recovery ventilation system has been reapproved and relisted for the Energy Technology List, so a business can claim the complete capital allowance in the first year on its spending on qualifying plant and equipment. Lossnay is listed under energy-saving plant and equipment.

Aereco has devised a solution for dwellings requiring mechanical ventilation that enables them to run on passive-stack ventilation for most of the time. The concept uses passive stack ventilation ducts coupled with non-permanent low-pressure mechanical assistance that is used only when the wind forces are not sufficient to ensure the required airflow. The mechanical assistance starts automatically and can be activated by a temperature sensor or pressure controller.

GE has introduced the space-saving Compact range of RCBOs (residual current breaker with overload protection) in response to the growing use of RCBOs for domestic and commercial applications. It is the same physical size as GE’s standard ElfaPlus range of modular MCBs, so it provides more cabling space in the consumer unit.

MK Electric’s Sentry range of skeleton units are spine backplate assemblies that fit within Mantel or Clifton type enclosure, essentially a kind of metal utilities cupboard, which may also contain the meter. These enclosures are particularly prevalent in social housing, which is a main area of activity under the Government’s Decent Homes Initiative.

ICS Heat Pump Technology now offers a 100 kW air-source heat-pump package that can deliver 65°C output temperatures without supplementary heating, even in ambient temperatures as low as -12°C. Such an output temperature enables existing boilers to be replaced with minimal work being required on the existing radiator system.

Thermo-Floor’s C-2050 plastic manifold is said to be faster to install than any other manifold. Once its mounting plate has been bolted into position, assembly can begin. The manifold slots onto the mounting plate, and the internal fixtures are clipped into place.

Daikin has added to the capabilities of its Altherma system for home heating and domestic hot water with a heat-pump convector that performs effectively with low flow temperatures. Its low noise levels [down to 19 dB(A)] make it suitable for bedrooms. There is a remote control with weekly timer for room temperature, fan speed, automatic or night mode and rapid heating or cooling.

Samsung’s Eco Heating System (EHS) provides integrated air-to-water and air-to-air heating and cooling for homes in a single system. The EHS consists of an integrated outdoor unit, indoor units (air conditioners), and a hydro unit that can be connected to water heating devices such as underfloor heating, radiators and domestic-hot-water tanks.