A revolutionary heating system that protects vulnerable residents is to be installed in a flagship eco-village development in Greater Manchester.
City West Housing Trust’s £14.3 million Barton Village scheme in Eccles will become one of the first developments in the UK to use the groundbreaking EcoPod technology, following a partnership between the Trust and Warrington-based Belfry Group.
The EcoPod Heating System was designed by Belfry Managing Director Keith Rimmer to alleviate fuel poverty in high-rise tower blocks.
As well as reducing fuel costs and carbon emissions by more than 40 per cent, it also features an innovative Building Management System (BMS), which automatically alerts landlords when ‘at risk’ tenants fail to adequately heat their properties.
Colette McKune, Director of Asset Management at City West Housing Trust, said: “Barton Village is a flagship regeneration project and we have been looking for innovative solutions in a number of different areas, not least on the heating side.
“In the past we have had fuel poverty issues in our blocks so we knew we had to develop a renewable strategy that was going to provide a solution for our tenants.
“This solution from Belfry enables us to heat properties at a cost that tenants can more readily afford so we are addressing the fuel poverty issue head on.
“Crucially, it also alerts us automatically when vulnerable residents are not using heating and hot water, which is a great early warning mechanism, particularly in the winter months when outside temperatures plummet.
“This will help us educate tenants on energy efficiency and significantly reduce their fuel bills.”
City West has been working in partnership with Cambridge University to carry out an Energy Demand Assessment of the Trust’s stock with a PhD engineering student living periodically in a flat at Barton Village studying how tenants’ behaviour affects energy efficiency.
The study found a number of tenants were only heating one room or not to the optimum temperature and recommended the EcoPod system be installed to overcome this.
At present electric storage heaters are used to heat flats at Barton Village but they are expensive to run, which puts tenants off using them.
However, they are about to be replaced by an EcoPod cascade boiler system, which is far more energy efficient and cheaper to use.
In practical terms it means tenants will only use heat and domestic hot water when required because the heat disruption units have a heat meter installed, which is monitored via Belfry’s bespoke web-based Building Management System.
Colette McKune said: “We’ve had problems with voids in our blocks due to damp and mould so we recently partnered with Cambridge University as part of its Energy Efficient Cities Initiative project, which is designed to help reduce carbon emissions and provide an asset management tool with detailed information about the costs, risks and benefits of possible retrofit actions.
“As part of that study we based a student in one of our buildings and he collected data on electrical usage, what temperatures tenants were heating their properties to, what rooms they were heating etc.
“What those studies found was a number of tenants were only heating one room, or they were only heating the room to 16 degrees, mainly due to costs, which went some way to explaining some of the issues.
“Now, thanks to the EcoPod, some of those problems could be resolved.
“The beauty of the Building Management System is it not only monitors the EcoPod, it also monitors the usage.
“At the moment a lot of our customers are on pre-payment cards or they get billed direct.
“Ultimately, those who are on pre-payment can end up paying more for their electricity.
“However, what Belfry have developed is a multi-billing platform that allows landlords to select the billing and payment method for each tenant.
“It also features a ‘top up’ facility which enables tenants to increase their credit from the comfort of their own home, either through the internet or via their mobile phones.”
Keith Rimmer, from Belfry, added: “City West are setting new standards in the social housing sector with Barton Village, both in terms of the quality of the fit-out and the materials they are using and the innovate things they are doing around renewable technology.
“Once they saw the EcoPod, and some of the cost savings it can deliver, they knew they had to incorporate it at Barton Village because there isn’t another product like it on the market."
“We recently fitted one in Hyde and the results were remarkable.
“It was a 16-storey tower block, with 96 apartments plus tenant areas, and on one day earlier this year it cost just £12.90 to provide heating and hot water for the whole building, which worked out at 13 pence per apartment.
“We also managed to dramatically reduce the building’s carbon footprint, reducing CO2 emissions from 160,000kg to 69,000kg.”
Belfry’s EcoPod has already won a number of awards, including ‘Project of the Year’ and ‘Environmental Initiative of the Year’ at the H and V Awards in London, which is the equivalent of The Oscars for the heating and ventilation industry.