Opinion

Are You Preparing For a Sustainable Future?

Jason Hobson

By Jason Hobson, managing director at Gledhill, the cylinder specialist

In the world of commercial developments ‘future proofing’ has become the buzz word driving design innovation. For domestic dwellings, it’s a concept closely linked to sustainability; ensuring that today’s installations can be adapted to tomorrow’s needs and technologies to reduce the cost and waste implications of early replacement.

So what does this actually mean for the renewables installer?  The short answer is that you need to think beyond the brief and the immediate requirements of a property and focus instead on the potential changes in the end user’s needs during the service life of the installation.

While the customer’s requirement may be for a solar PV installation, for example, they may decide in the future that they want to add a wood burning stove. If this happens and the existing cylinder or thermal store doesn’t have tappings that allow additional energy sources to be added, the cylinder will need to be replaced, which is both costly and wasteful.

By selecting a cylinder such as the Torrent GreenHeat HP SOL thermal store, which allows a combination of heat pump, solar energy and wood burning stove in the same system, this situation can be avoided and the installation can be future-proofed to enable renewable technologies to be added over time. The range is also supplied with a wide selection of tappings and additional bespoke tappings can be added at the time of ordering to enable tailored products aligned to the potential modifications for the specific property.

The renewables market is developing at a significant pace so predicting future requirements is not always easy.  However, the very ethos of a renewables installation is to drive sustainability and reduce costs: without a clear emphasis on how an installation can be adapted throughout its service life those key principles cannot be addressed.