It shocks community groups when they discover their heating controls are wasting energy. Our new project will help five groups with listed buildings in Glasgow check their controls and help us make fixing this easier for everyone. We’re grateful to the Glasgow City Heritage Trust, the Scottish Episcopal Church United Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway, and the churches involved for the opportunity to do this work.
Although everyone should aim to move away from fossil fuels in the long run, trimming fossil fuel use is still important. Larger changes will take a while. Meanwhile, the waste can be substantial. Some changes also reduce the likelihood that building users will sneak in space heaters. Here are some of the actions groups have done or intend to do, based on advice from us and from our volunteer engineers:
- repairing an old motorised valve and reinstating a timeswitch so two halls could be heated independently
- switching to independent heating in a small room to avoid heating a church just to keep an office worker warm
- installing radiant heating for a frequently used part of a church sanctuary to avoid heating the whole space
- replacing old controls with an “optimised start” model so they don’t have to guess when to turn the heating on – our best estimate is that this saves most lightly occupied buildings around 20% of their fuel use and usually improves comfort, too.
- replacing thermostatic radiator valves with controls that users can only reset for a limited time
- restricting the range of thermostats so the building can’t be left too hot or too cold
- moving to controls that can be set over the internet, so that volunteers can manage to reset the heating every week and for last minute events
- disabling “override” buttons that would have no effect for the users pushing them
- sourcing heating controls despite being told their only solution was to buy a new boiler
- correcting a miswired thermostat had kept a hall warm 24/7 for 10 years
Groups have changed their controls using the information in our Guide Book, but they usually need more help. It’s hard to work out what’s happening with the controls in a building sometimes because there are so many different things that could be wrong about what you have and how they are set up! We’re using this project to think about how to set up a better step by step guide for what to do.
We’ve also discovered that it’s very difficult for most people who run community buildings to find companies that are interested in taking on heating controls work or that understand how to design with the new “smart controls” like smart thermostatic radiator valves. We’re starting to make the right connections to companies and electricians to help the whole process of changing the controls smoother, as well as understand who might give grants for this work. The sums are relatively modest and pay back quickly, but they can be a few thousand pounds in the most complex cases, and that’s beyond the means of some groups.
Part of the project will be making sure groups understand how many more years they can expect their boiler to work and their decarbonised heating options. If they wait until the heating quits to think about this, then an emergency boiler replacement will lock them into fossil fuels for many years to come.