With economic uncertainty dampening the abilities of businesses to compete in a domestic and global market, energy, maintenance and plant operators are under increasing pressure to reduce operational costs. A new guide sheds light on the core challenges with traditional boilerhouse energy measurement and areas for improvement.
Authored by Darren Silverthorn, National Controls and Metering Specialist at Spirax Sarco, the new guide aims to support operational management teams by highlighting areas for improvement that could be made to enhance efficiency and reduce the money spent paying for energy.
‘A guide to identifying the true efficiency of your boilerhouse’ identifies several issues with traditional boilerhouse energy measurement including using burner efficiency to indicate the overall efficiency of their boilerhouse. Additionally, it highlights eight potential areas for improvement that managers could be missing out on, resulting in a potentially unoptimised system, higher operating costs, increased fuel consumption and carbon emissions.
The guide highlights the benefits of using a cost-effective, innovative solution to safely and efficiently get a full overview of the performance of the steam system such as a boilerhouse energy monitor.
There is often limited means of energy monitoring in most boilerhouses and therefore limited knowledge of overall boilerhouse performance with facilities often unaware of where energy losses could be identified. A boilerhouse energy monitor provides a compact solution to gather that all important data – helping facilities managers to help themselves.
“UK businesses have suffered from weakened competitiveness owing to rising energy costs and an uncertain economic environment,” Darren Silverthorn said. “These businesses, could reduce their operational costs by monitoring the energy performance of their boilerhouse, to understand the losses the steam system could be experiencing.
“This guide aims to help energy, maintenance and plant operators to help themselves by providing them with the areas they could improve upon to boost boilerhouse efficiency, reduce operating costs and make tomorrow a more efficient, cost-effective day.”
If you are under pressure to reduce the running costs of your boiler house, then I have some tips you may find useful.
If you’re involved in the planning or upgrading of boilers, or responsible for the day to day running of steam boilers - large and small - you’ll need to know your way around a boiler. You’ll also need a basic understanding of the properties of steam.
Steam is an incredible heat transfer medium. Every kilogram of steam contains around 2200 kj of condensable energy. That’s 26 times more usable energy than a kilogram of water in a typical heating system based on flow and return temperatures with a delta of 20oC.