Hybrid Heating boiler performance – Field Trials with British Gas

Case Study  Technology Field Trials for new renewable heating energy systems

Client profile

British Gas are the nations largest energy provider for both businesses and homes. By using innovative energy solutions and providing smarter living solutions to maintain continuous improvement for their customers, British gas are committed to “help people today and secure energy for tomorrow”.

Project Overview

These field trials aimed to answer a lot of the questions when looking onto new emerging energy technologies like heating systems after the introduction of the government incentive, RHI. British Gas was looking to test the performance of several different boilers from various manufacturers under different scenarios (type of home and location).

One of the key challenges when looking at performance of new technologies is finding out how well this will perform when it is out of the laboratory and into a real life situation, customers homes. Different weather conditions and home insulation can have very different effects on heating systems. The monitoring technology had to also be accurate, easy to install and not affect any of the customers involved in the trials.

British Gas were looking for results on the following:

• Is renewable technology / boiler performance the same as indicated by the manufacturer

• How often does the boiler needs to runHow much energy is being generated from fossil fuel and how much from ‘green sources’

• What are the temperature comfort levels of the home vs the energy usage of the new hybrid boiler

• Coefficient of Performance [CoP]

• Are the new heating systems able to repay by themselves in efficiency.

Solution

British Gas contacted Logic Energy with their requirements to remotely monitor new boiler technologies installed across the UK and inside multiple types of homes. Part of our cooperation was to work together with the design and specification of the remote monitoring system for British Gas field trials project with two key objectives: Keeping the cost at minimum and making sure results/data were available from day one in order to avoid any delays on the project completion.

Some of the aspects measured in this Field Trials project were:

Flow rates in, out and inside the boiler systemTemperatures in different points within the heating system (flow, return, internal exchanger…)Energy being generated from fossil fuel and from ‘green sources’Individual monitoring of heat used for heating or tap waterIndoor and outdoor temperature monitoring

Benefits

British Gas is still today continuously receiving data from the boiler field trial system. From every single installation they have direct access to Live data via Logic Energy remote monitoring & telemetry system. And are able to make quicker decisions by having instant remote information data.

The Logic Energy web engine was used to build a simple bespoke performance indicator of all the system in real time. This provides a snapshot of what is happening, how the system are performing and most importantly: is everything as it should be? Best of all – not a single excel file or byte needs to be downloaded from the Logic Energy portal, all the results are pre-calculated in real time 24/7 – That is results on demand!