Your New High Efficiency Condensing Boilers are Still Leaving Money on the Table

 

Provocative article title isn’t it? Perhaps, but let us reassure you that it is based on a set of data that is 100% factual, and almost 100% misunderstood or misrepresented.

If your building has a boiler system more than 10 to 15 years old, then you are probably looking at investments in newer boiler designs now, or in the near future. These new boiler designs will probably carry a number of new features that make them more energy efficient, more maintenance free, and provide more stable temperatures throughout your building.

One of the ways new boilers achieve this, is by the introduction of boiler control features like outdoor reset, built directly into the boiler (on board control).  As the USA’s largest and longest manufacturer of heating controls, it turns out that we know something about this.  Indeed if outdoor reset features are designed into the boiler correctly, this can help the boiler make more intelligent firing decisions based on the outdoor temperature.  Visit the Heat-Timer® website for more information on outdoor reset, and how it works.

Got Outdoor Reset Features in my New Boiler, so I’m Good Right?

Well you’re definitely better off than you’d be without it, but the problem is that this isn’t the end game when it comes to fuel savings.  Outdoor reset is just one factor in efficient boiler operation in your building.  It turns out that the use of more sophisticated multi-point indoor sensor usage, and the incorporation of advanced “learning” algorithms that assimilate outdoor temperature readings with even more building sensor data, have been shown to achieve another 20% in fuel savings in a typical single or multiple condensing boiler configuration.  This is true even with new boilers that already incorporate an outdoor reset feature.

If you’re a building owner/manager who just made a significant investment on new boilers and piping for your apartment building/complex, we get that this news may be a bit depressing.  However, let us assure you that if you replaced boilers more than 10 or 15 years old, you did the right thing on principle.  Furthermore, it turns out that additional savings are still possible for you, and can be achieved for far less investment than you made to buy and plumb all those boilers.  Here’s how a sophisticated heating system can help your new boilers reach their full potential.

How Can So Much Additional Money Be Saved On Fuel on a Brand New Boiler System?

In one sense, a heating control that uses only outdoor temperature as a heat regulation system, still has the potential to be inefficient.  This has to do with many factors including the fact that all areas of your building will not lose heat at the same rate.  Nor will heat be delivered to all areas of your building at exactly the same temperature.  In a multi-unit, multi-floor building using hydronic heating delivered with a condensing boiler system, other factors come into play as well like heat loss up the stack, transfer loss, system pressure, and most importantly different tenant comfort thresholds.

In a system that uses a more sophisticated control like the Heat-Timer® Multi-Mod, all these factors and more are used to determine and even anticipate optimal boiler firing schedules and durations. Essentially this system “learns” how to heat your building and all its units, over time.  One set of key datapoints comes from the Heat-Timer® space sensors that are placed strategically around your building.  These sensors are our agents in the field, reporting actual temperatures from all areas of your building.  They are wireless so installation is a breeze and they communicate with the control to allow decisions in real time.  Over time, heating patterns are recognized and heating curves are adjusted based on the heat loss characteristics of that specific building.  Thereby maintaining the comfort of your residents while using the absolute minimum fuel while doing so.  Outdoor reset is certainly part of these calculations but the total picture is so much more complex than just knowing the outdoor temperature.  The Heat-Timer® Multi-Mod algorithms understand this and customers using our control in apartment complexes in exactly these conditions have reported over 20% savings on fuel bills.  While not sacrificing resident comfort in the process!

Another consideration is that a sophisticated control like the Heat-Timer® Multi-Mod gives you all this data remotely on every manner of wireless device or internet device.  Our BuildingNet portal puts control and management at your fingertips, including the readout’s of space sensor’s, real time reports on system status, alarms and much more. The ease with which building managers can remotely oversee and modify the operation of multiple boilers, multiple boiler rooms, and multiple buildings is a whole different kind of efficiency and cost savings that can only be achieved with a dedicated control backed by decades of control infrastructure development.

Heat-Timer – Still Saving Building Operators Money

The moral of this story is simple: don’t settle for being a one-trick pony when it comes to heating controls. Whether you use our controls for a few units, or thousands of units, we scale into any configuration you can imagine to bring you the most energy savings possible.

For more information, call the team at Heat-Timer® today. Or visit us today at: https://www.heat-timer.com/contact-us.

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