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Housing developer, Sandrock, was keen to make its West Sussex development more energy efficient. It enlisted the help of The Gas Saving Company to design a new Home energy centre, including Alpha Heating Innovation’s FlowSmart, to provide a high performing and energy saving heating and hot water system.
Chris Farrell, inventor of GasSaver and owner of The Gas Saving Company, is an expert when it comes to energy efficiency. He saves his customers money by assessing their current designs and then reworking them. In the case of Sandrock, it opted to replace its traditional boiler system with The Gas Saving Company’s patented Home energy centre in its West Sussex development of two, four-bedroom timber framed homes. This meant they were able to remove over £6,500 of unnecessary solar PV, which also freed up over 2m3 of internal space by removing the need for large hot water cylinders.
Alpha’s Flowsmart offers the energy efficient benefits usually associated with a combi boiler while maintaining a high performance capability, making it a perfect component of the Home energy centre. FlowSmart works by sending cold mains water to the GasSaver, which is pre-heated using reclaimed flue gases, before diverting it to the copper coil heat exchanger in the thermal store. This is then further heated by the surrounding hot water from the primary system, before a blending valve brings the water down to an optimum temperature of 30ºC before it enters the boiler. This mechanism allows the boiler to satisfy heavy water demand for a sustained period of time, without any detrimental impact on the flow rate.
Chris Farrell commented, “Our Home energy centre has a modular design suitable for all sizes of homes, including underfloor heating, and multi-bathroom properties requiring pumped hot-water circuits.
“One of the benefits of the Home energy centre is that for new build developments it provides the highest SAP rating, so I needed a boiler that could work seamlessly with the system and Alpha’s FlowSmart offers that capability.”
Adam Barker, Managing Director at Sandrock, said, “We were already familiar with the impressive SAP ratings a system like this could offer because we used a similar set up at our Balls Yard residential development in Crawley. However, the Alpha FlowSmart and Home energy centre provided above and beyond our expectations. The SAP report showed we were under the required Target Emission Rate, which was a great achievement.”