Pumps tend to be seen by many in the heating sector as small, insignificant components, and it doesn’t really matter which one you use as part of a system — they’ll all do the job. "How wrong can you be?" asks pump manufacturer Wilo
In fact the humble pump is potentially a major energy user and selecting the right one can save a significant amount on your customer’s energy bill each year. So selecting the most energy-efficient pump you can buy makes huge sense.
Energy saving and reducing emissions are still the hottest topics in the domestic heating sector and are set to stay that way for the foreseeable future. With Government looking for ever more domestic energy efficiency, the constant search for opportunities to save more energy continues apace.
Whilst renewable technologies are key to the future, the boiler — condensing or otherwise — will still be the prime provider of heating and hot water in the UK for the next 15 to 20 years at the very least. Solar, air and ground source heat pumps and individual CHP may be 'sexy'. But without significant Government incentives to invest in them, they will remain peripheral until they become cheaper to install, either because they get very much less expensive in themselves or because there are meaningful grants to help pay for them and reduce their ‘pay back’ time, or because the psyche here in the UK changes to accept them as mainstream options, which will take significant time and investment by the suppliers.
Building Regulations Part L has pretty much addressed the issues relating to boiler efficiency in new boiler installations. They can’t get much more efficient than SEDBUK Band A. However, in the same way that there are still huge numbers of elderly boilers operating across the UK at anything from a meagre 40 per cent efficiency upwards — and probably will be for years to come, as the trend towards repairing rather than replacing boilers, that the Government was warned about, seems to be manifesting itself — there are massive numbers of elderly, energy guzzling, uncontrolled domestic pumps and circulators operating on wet heating systems and using far more electricity than is really necessary in this day and age.
Efficient technology development
For many years Wilo has been developing ever more efficient pump technology. It not only invented the first small circulating pump, but also developed the first ‘A’ rated pump — and has gone on to develop its EC (electronic commutated) motor technology and permanent magnet rotors. These have been incorporated into its Stratos-Eco pump series which offers in the region of 80 per cent energy consumption reduction over standard uncontrolled pumps. The new Wilo Eco-Stratos uses just 6W of input — that’s less than a TV or DVD standby mechanism, that uses around 8W.
In fact the Wilo-Stratos ECO high-efficiency pump has recently come top in independent tests as the best in energy efficiency and in price/performance ratio, compared to all other small circulator heating pumps. The tests suggest that over a period of 20 years, in a typical single-family house application scenario, the Wilo Stratos-Eco incurs electricity costs of only 238 Euros.
