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Customer Brief
The Broughton’s is a purpose-built care home that accommodates 42 bedrooms, 31 of which have private bathroom facilities for care home residents.
Well-Being Residential were keen to look at options to improve the reliability of the on-site heating and hot water throughout the care home and to lower energy usage and associated energy bills.
Challenges within a Care Home
Due to the age and vulnerability of many care home residents, care home providers face daily challenges in providing care facilities that perform against all the safety standards and regulations set by authorities and health officials whilst still delivering against operational/financial targets.
As expected, elderly people are not as active in their later years and tend to feel the cold more than others, it is therefore essential that to prevent illness care homes provide a warm and comfortable environment for residents by running heating systems 24/7 365 days a year.
As important as the need to provide heat it is also essential that care homes provide continuous supplies of temperature controlled hot water to assist with the personal hygiene of residents, staff, and visitors, and to maintain overall cleanliness throughout the care home by helping to combat germs and the spread of infectious viruses/bacteria’s such as covid-19 and legionella (the latter often associated with inadequate hot water storage).
Commercial Boilers Solution – ATAG Commercial XL Model
For the challenges highlighted above, it is not possible for care homes to reduce the operating hours of their heating and hot water systems and therefore the only way to lower energy usage and associated energy bills is to ensure that the commercial boilers and hot water systems on-site are of the highest efficiencies and controlled by modern thermostat controls.
Due to natural aged, related wear and tear it’s estimated that a commercial boiler 15+ years in age is operating at 60% efficiency and therefore resulting in customers wasting up to 40% of the energy that they are being charged for.
To deliver a highly efficient solution OKEL chose to remove the obsolete boilers and replace them with an ATAG XL70 and XL110 fully modulating system boilers.
The ATAG XL boiler was chosen for this project for the following reasons: –
Given the vulnerability of the residents at The Broughton’s, staff were keen to ensure that the plant room upgrade took place in the warmer weather.
To minimise any downtime of heating / hot water OKEL’s lead engineer completed a follow-up pre-installation site visit prior to the spring installation to fully determine the best approach for the switch over to include the decommissioning and removal of the existing boilers, pipework and flue alterations and installation of the commercial boilers.
Throughout the installation, the outage was kept to an absolute minimum and care home staff notified in advance so they were able to prepare the residents and ensure that any outage did not cause interference with planned activities/day to day tasks.
All works were completed to schedule and with Gas Safe and NICEIC electrical commissioning certification issued upon project completion.
