RS Hydro Install Clamp-On Heat Metering Network
Like most large organisations, one central boiler room is used to heat or cool multiple buildings. In this case student accommodation, lecture theatres, laboratories, sports halls and high-rise departmental buildings are being monitored.
Like most large organisations, one central boiler room is used to heat or cool multiple buildings. In this case student accommodation, lecture theatres, laboratories, sports halls and high-rise departmental buildings are being monitored.One of the main requirements of this project was that there should be no interruptions or modifications to the pipework or the heating system. The majority of the feeds were 150mm nominal bore mild steel pipes.
Other alternatives were considered including orifice plates and electromagnetic flow meters. However, pipe modification costs, labour, instrumentation and downtime costs far exceeded costs associated with clamp on heat meters.
A mixture of single and dual channel flow meters were used to measure flows on unrestricted and restricted lengths of pipework. One of the main problems in locating the point of flow measurement in heat metering systems is that there is often not enough straight pipe to ensure a full developed flow profile. A typical boiler room usually consists of boilers, heat exchangers, an intricate maze of insulated pipework often with small straight sections of pipe, frequented with valves, pipe fittings and live and redundant instrumentation and also small confined spaces.
Two-channel flow meters with two pairs of transducers located at 90º to each other allows the end user to measure flows in more restricted environments and where other flow meters would struggle to ascertain accurate flow measurement.
Some two channel flow meters were also used to monitor two separate heating circuits and provide two separate signals to the local heat meters. Two-channel flow meters help to reduce the overall instrumentation costs by only requiring one transmitter as opposed to two separate transmitters.
For all of the heat meters, digital signals were fed into local telemetry systems with the information collected centrally in one building. It was therefore possible to monitor energy consumption and boiler performance 24 hours per day 365 days per year.
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7th Oct 2012