Rob Berridge ponders engineer status, and the future of fuels and technologies.
When forming an opinion, one must have experience or at least some recognised understanding of the subject in question. These are fundamental qualifications that generally only come from many years of repetitive and lucid actions that are always very hard earned and indeed, can make or break a career.
I struggle to understand and quantify the position of ‘engineer’ continuously and for one reason only; what is classed as an engineer, or indeed anyone who personally facilitates the ongoing responsibility and the long term wellbeing of others and their relative systems?
A simple search of the word finds ‘A person who uses scientific knowledge to solve practical problems!’ This now has to beg the questions I list below:
Our fossil fuel industry is hanging on by its finger tips because of a new, government endorsed and unprecedented bunch of engineers/politicians that tell us that electricity or, ‘renewable’ energy is now economically within our grasp.
To give balance, this also includes the heavily lobbied, hydrogen camp that assures us we can continue to burn their new fuel, unabated, with very little physical or financial disruption to our established lives.
Either way, we are in for some massive changes within our industry, so should we be scared? No, is the quick answer but as you will see, we are in desperate need of a well overdue shake-up that could ensure accountability, confidence and long-term trust. To earn that, I argue that we must be prepared to raise our game and have robust support in place to collectively help each other in the quest for government required future efficiencies.
Are modern gas boilers the solution or are heat pumps, hydrogen units or indeed direct electric systems the way forward?
As heating engineers, we simply should not care what the heat source is but we should absolutely understand which one is most suitable for our clients’ needs and building types.
Currently, there are only a couple of gas boiler manufacturers in the UK market that offer decent modulation ratios. The Viessmann 200W, for instance, can mod down to an impressive 1.7kW, which is pretty good for the average U.K. home. But as we now are seemingly (and quite rightly so in my opinion) being dragged kicking and screaming in a move towards better build quality and more insulated homes, is this enough or should we now start thinking about the suitability of any fossil fuel appliance being installed when possibly, better efficiency could be achieved by installing heat pumps, solar or indeed direct electric? Gas appliances, and burners in particular, seem to have a finite lower threshold that they can safely burn at and unless we can either improve on that technology, make provision for buffering systems etc, I cannot see how the fossil fuel industry (in domestic properties at least) might meet the efficiency challenges being placed before us?
Even if we can produce bio-fuels, hydrogen etc, we are still paying for it – and if it cannot technically be efficient because of physics, we are still wasting the energy it produces. Waste is waste, regardless of how much an industry might want to sell it to us.
Quantifying the heat loss of any existing building or proposed retrofit is obviously the very first, crucial step in our collective march towards efficiency and indeed, with the average UK home currently only requiring between 6 and 8kW, I would strongly argue, as implied above, that unless gas or any fossil fuel appliances can be made more efficient with ratios able to range down into Watts, we have already surpassed their suitability for the average home?
However, if we simply hurtle the industry towards low temperature, long run time systems like heat pumps or solar, we absolutely need to get pipework specification, variable flow rates and emitter sizing bang on or we will be taking a step backwards. Gone are the days of guesswork, generic pipe design and ‘that’ll do’ attitudes because systems simply will not work efficiently without correct design.
Education is therefore now key and indeed many independent companies are emerging to help engineers understand hydronic system design with private training courses, online tools and growing technical support.
This is a really exciting time to be involved in the heating industry and I encourage everyone to jump on the new technologies emerging but most of all, take advantage of the wealth of knowledge out there and really, ‘get into’ your chosen profession.
#BeaPro
