Hodkinson Consultancy on study trip to Denmark

Donald Sinclair and Matthew Bailey from Hodkinson Consultancy recently took part in a 3 day study trip to Denmark to study their use of district heating. The aim of the trip was to learn how best to design, construct and operate district heating from a country where around 60% of buildings are connected to a heat network, more than ten times as many as in the UK.

We aim to adopt many of the lessons we learnt on this study trip and use these constructively on UK projects to improve performance.

The overriding impression was that in Denmark they construct and operate successful, efficient and low cost heat networks. Primarily this comes from many decades’ experience of what works and what does not.

More specifically, the following are commonplace in Denmark and assist in delivering high quality networks that have lower heat losses and do not have issues of corridor overheating:

• Top entry and bottom exit radiators that incorporate pre-settable flow controlling valves or return temperature limiters;
• Water treatment with Reverse Osmosis and water softening equipment to give consistent circulating water quality from the energy centre in to the dwellings;
• No regular maintenance scheduled for dwelling Heat Interface Units as they are consistently installed correctly and water quality kept to a high standard. This substantially reduces heating costs to residents;
• Assistance from heat network operators direct to residents (letters and phone calls) to explain to them how to reduce return temperatures, which in turn reduces their heat costs.

Our thanks to SAV for their assistance in organising an informative study trip in Denmark.