Current Heating System

Barony College- Current Heating System

Introduction

At present, the main buildings at Barony College are heated by three separate heating systems. An oil burning system heats the original building, Kirk Michael House, while an electric boiler system heats the newer teaching block. Finally, there is a separate electric system which supplies heat to the games hall.

Kirk Michael House

Heat is supplied by a fuel oil industrial boiler (pictured right) with a rated output of 335kW. This system supplies heat to a hot water tank and a wet radiator system. It is controlled by a Trend controller which regulates the indoor temperature to approximately 20°C. This system is in fact comfortably able to meet the demands of this part of the college although it is likely that it will be replaced as the college looks to meet its entire heating demand with a single biomass system.

New Teaching Block

The heating in this part of the building is supplied by seven GEC Nightstar 250 Electric Boilers each with a capacity of 51kW. Again, this system supplies heat to a hot water tank and a wet radiator system. This system operates on the basic principle of a storage heater, in that the water is heated up over night when electricity is cheaper and then used through the day to heat the building.

There are a number of problems with the current situation involving this system, with the fundamental issue being its inability to adequately heat the building. As is often the case with storage heating systems it is common with this current system for all the heat stored up overnight to be dissipated by as early as mid afternoon, meaning that auxiliary heating (in the form of electric heaters, meaning expensive day-rate electricity) is required to heat the building.

Furthermore, it is controlled by modem from a central facility 10 miles away in the town of Dumfries with Barony College having no way of altering the settings on-site. This is exacerbated by the fact that the building housing the central control is no longer a council office. Clearly this situation is far from ideal in terms of providing adequate independence for the college in terms of heating control.

The final significant problem with the system is one of reliability. Of the seven boilers, five have to be in operation for demand to be met and this has become increasingly difficult as reliability problems have led to only five of the seven being available at any one time. This is in part due to the rarity of the system meaning that spare parts are extremely difficult to come by. Often the only solution is to obtain the parts from one of the inactive boilers, further impacting reliability.

Games Hall

Finally, the games hall is heated by two GEC Electrishare AHU heaters on a separate system to the electric boilers. Again this system is controlled from the central facility in Dumfries. Games hall heating is also supplemented by the dumping of excess heat from the rest of the building into the hall through the vent shown in the picture. This is not an ideal situation as it is generally desirable to keep the hall relatively cool, in order to maintain an acceptable level of comfort for students participating in sports.

Conclusion