Right-sizing heat exchangers for energy efficiency and cost reduction

Clamp-on heat meters help to right-size large heating systems

Katronic clamp-on portable heat meters are helping a leading UK supplier of large-scale steam heating systems to accurately log and monitor heat flows in hospitals, large-scale food factories and other significant energy users as an integral part of their proposals and pre-sales process. The information logged by the meters means that they can be confident that they are capturing total energy requirements as well as measuring peak demand so that the new equipment they put forward will exactly match the customers’ requirements and give them the substantial energy and cost savings that justifies the work.

Katronic’s KATflow 230 is a non-invasive, clamp-on ultrasonic flowmeter. A pair of compact, stainless-steel transducers are simply clamped to the outside of the hot water pipe, as close to the main heat exchanger as possible. Ultrasonic pulses fire across the pipe width both ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ to measure the speed of the flow, which is then converted to a flow volume. Temperature probes are clamped onto the flow and return pipes, and the temperature recorded is integrated with the flow measurement to give a direct measurement of the heat in the system and both the total heat usage and, crucially, the peak demand across the network.

One of the company’s sales engineers has used a KATflow 230 on a number of projects. He says ‘The flowmeter is a really important tool for me. We have had a number of projects where it has been really difficult to assess the boiler house duty, but the KATflow meter has allowed us to log the flows, see the numbers and the peak demand and make accurate proposals.’

With proposals backed up with accurate data, the heating system manufacturer is able to prove to their customers that the systems they offer are based on real heat demand. In many cases, that has led to some very substantial savings in energy usage, translating in at least one case to annualised savings of more than £500,000. 

KATflow 230 measurements have now been used by this company in nearly twenty large scale heat exchanger surveys, in applications as diverse as health care and general hospitals, food and beverage factories, confectionery and dairy. They are providing customers with significant opportunities to make real savings in costs and in carbon, to the benefit of everyone.