Practical experience from the pilot installation in Omice II
The first issue was the strange behaviour of temperatures at the cold-water inlet to the boiler. When the boiler was heated to more than 55°C and we switched on the circulation pump, we noticed that warm water was being pushed into the cold-water inlet against the direction of flow. This shouldn´t be happening, but obviously it was. See the black curve in the graph below, which is furious when the circulation is switched on (yellow) and calm when the circulation is not switched on (overnight).
The data helped us to detect an error in the installed system - the non-return valve wasn´t installed in the correct place. Because the warm water was getting where it shouldn´t, the boiler was cooled more than it should be. The solution is simple: the plumber should install another non-return valve that will keep the warm water where it should be. But we would never have discovered this phenomenon without measuring.
The second example was the leakage of water into the irrigation system. After putting the water meters into operation, we noticed that we were losing approximately 2l of water per day. Upon closer examination we discovered a defect in the irrigation valve.
I wonder how many households have similar problems that we don´t know about just because they are not measured.
We will not find out about these imperfections from the annual reading of the water meter or the monthly reading of the electricity meter. Easily accessible real data are of key importance, whether they concern energy consumption, water or PV production.
These and many other data are reliably provided to the user by the iCOOL4 control system installed on Teco hardware – both quality Czech products.
If energy and consumption are important to us, then we should measure them so that we can respond to the information obtained. In other words, we measure what is important to us. And what we measure, we can influence.
Practical knowledge from March 2021 can be found here: Practical experience from the pilot installation in Omice.
