SAV’s RavenWatch is a new monitoring platform developed specifically around the challenges of operating UK heat networks.
RavenWatch provides a real-time view of network performance, allowing energy and building managers to identify problems earlier, prepare for HNTAS (Heat Network Technical Assurance Scheme) compliance and continually optimise how their networks operate.
The expected standards aim to ensure that heat networks across the UK meet higher standards of reliability and efficiency for consumers. At the same time, heat networks have come under Ofgem regulation for the first time, bringing consumer protection closer into line with other regulated utilities.
The dashboard provides network managers a simple view of the metrics that demonstrate where a network is performing as it should, where attention may be required and where there are opportunities to improve performance.
The software monitors key plant equipment including heat pumps, CHPs, electric boilers, gas boilers and other critical assets, alongside performance measures such as return temperature, heat loss, bypass and connectivity. It can provide analysis from an individual dwelling through to block, site and portfolio level.
“Heat networks can be considerably more efficient than the systems they replace, but that performance does not happen automatically. It comes from good design, good operation and the ability to understand what the network is doing. That is the gap RavenWatch has been designed to help close,” commented Lukas Fabricius, Product Manager at SAV.
“We wanted RavenWatch to take something technically complicated and make it useful. You should be able to open the dashboard and understand how your network is performing, where the opportunities are and what needs attention.”
Heat networks operate as interconnected energy systems that enable buildings and neighbourhoods to make use of large-scale, renewable, and otherwise wasted sources of heat that would simply not be available to individual homes.
“This is an important difference between a heat network and the status quo – hundreds of individual homes each operating their own heating system. A well-designed and well-operated heat network can perform far more efficiently because generation, distribution and demand can be considered together, rather than one property at a time,” Fabricius continued.
“Ensuring those benefits are actually realised for the people connected to the network is itself an important part of consumer protection. A network may have been designed to provide low-cost, low-carbon heat, but that promise depends on how well it continues to operate year after year.”
With insights from RavenWatch, operators can make changes such as reducing temperatures and flow rates where appropriate, lowering heat losses and pumping requirements, improving the performance of heat generation and finding incremental savings throughout the system.
Those improvements can add up. In one 130-home scheme, monitoring identified two apartments with unusually high bypass flow. Correcting this reduced flow through the two apartments from around 130 litres per hour to an average of just 4 litres per hour.
The resulting reduction in heat loss was worth approximately £6,000 a year at a heat tariff of 15 pence per kWh – equivalent to around £46 for every dwelling on the network – before taking into account the additional reduction in pumping costs.
“The opportunity is not simply to fix things when they go wrong,” Fabricius explains. “Once you can see how a network is performing in detail, you can keep improving it. Small changes to flow, temperatures and operation can compound across hundreds of homes, steadily reducing the cost of running the network and, ultimately, the cost of heat for consumers.”
RavenWatch is available for all heat networks at a cost of £7 per meter per year. It currently encompasses 12,860 monitoring points across UK heat networks and, as coverage grows, will provide an increasingly detailed picture of how heat networks are performing across the country.
Learn more https://www.sav-systems.com/products/ravenwatch/
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