Electrical Contracting News (ECN) June 2017 | Page 54

SPECIAL
FEATURE
ENERGY MANAGEMENT
HOT TOPIC
Mark McManus, UK managing director at Stiebel Eltron, explains why
instantaneous hot water could provide an electric future for new build apartments.
A
lmost half of new
builds in the UK in
2017 are city centre
flats and apartments,
whether that be
Private Rented
Sector (PRS), homes
for sale or student
accommodation.
The typical fuel for heating and
hot water in these developments is
electricity, with a common preference
for domestic hot water (DHW) provided
by unvented cylinders heated by electric
immersion heaters.
It is no secret that instantaneous hot
water (IHW) heaters would offer a range of
benefits against stored water heating, from
saving space and reducing running costs,
to a maintenance free operation.
54 | June 2017
So why hasn’t this solution been used
until now?
Currently, apartments within the UK are
each fed by a single phase 230V supply – to
achieve the excellent performance values
that can be reached with instantaneous hot
water heaters, you would need a 3-phase
400V product.
So, how would we get around this? New
build apartments do have 400V provided to
each floor in the riser pipe system, but at
the moment this is split down into a phase
per apartment. However, by taking the 400V
to each apartment, the IHW solution is
made possible.
There is, of course, an additional cost
to installing 400V to each apartment, but
having investigated and run a number of
data simulators, we believe that the costs
can be quite simply balanced out.
Even in a dwelling
with multiple
occupants, hot water
will not run out as
it would eventually
with a stored
heating cylinder.