HeatCanvas™
HeatCanvas™ is a Web App created to make room heat loss calculations "come to life" and be easily understood (and adapted) by homeowners. Bridges the gap between the basic calculators previously available on the web, and the sophisticated engineering tools and spreadsheets used by professionals.
Built as a JavaScript Single Page Application (SPA) using the Angular framework and HTML5 canvas (using the Three.js library). The vision for the product is to become a communication and advice tool linking up home owners, technical specialists, and the providers of services (contractors, installers, manufacturers).
Heat-as-a-Service (HaaS)
There are significant challenges (an understatement) to the mass roll out of low-carbon heat in the UK. The necessity to replace a large percentage of domestic gas boilers with heat pump technology will be difficult:
- Heat pumps are complex thermodynamic 'machines' which require careful design, installation, and commissioning in order to work at desired efficiencies.
- Most existing heat emitter systems (radiators) are far from ideal for effective low temperature heating.
- Most of the UK's housing stock is poorly insulated, requiring careful targeted improvements prior to the installation of a heat pump solution.
- Heat pump solutions are expensive and must operate close to the design coefficient-of-performance (COP) in order to justify the financial outlay. (Whereas gas boilers are cheap, so typical suboptimal performance is ignored.)
- Heat pump solutions are expensive, so third party finance will be required. This will require 'heat-as-a-service' (HaaS) provision, to remove the capital outlay burden from the homeowner.
- With a HaaS rollout, heat pumps will need comprehensive monitoring to detect faults and suboptimal performance. Monitoring will also permit the identification of best practice.
- Highly skilled and experienced specialists/engineers are required to design and commission effective heat pump installations. In order to roll out at scale, IT solutions will be required to shrink the skill and experience gap.
OwlIT has been working with partners and specialists in the heat pump contractor market, along with academics from computer science / computational optimisation specialisms, to examine the feasibility of creating an IT platform to unlock the potential of HaaS within the UK.