Services

Strategic Consultancy

Hurtwood offers strategic consultancy for large and complex systems such as BMS and heat Supply Systems, ensuring that clients and organisations get the best possible result out of investment in these systems as a result of plant renewals such as AHU refurbishments and boiler replacements.

In the 2000's we worked with many organisations to develop heat supply strategies for large campus and manufacturing sites, including factories, hospitals and universities, producing a long term strategy for the renewal or replacement of legacy steam and high/medium temperature hot water systems.

Since 2010, we have been increasingly asked to produce strategies for BMS which reflects:

the growing problem of obsolescence within the industry and the large number of organisations that are having to carry out wholesale upgrades of their BMS, often to equipment which is physically very different and operates in a very different way, from the equipment that preceded it.
Many organisations have suffered from a lack of a strategy in the past or a lack of control over equipment installed by projects teams, ending up with a wide variety of different BMSs and control and monitoring systems.
There is also the straightforward problem of organisations merging, often with very different systems.
Some BMSs are still single source for maintenance and new projects or only a very limited pool of installers exists which have a limited ability to compete with the parent manufacturer which can drive up costs.

Design

Hurtwood has a considerable expertise in the design of a wide range of mechanical and electrical services and regularly produces improved or more cost effective designs for services as well as working with the more innovative designs that are appearing within the building services. This stems from our core belief that each clients requirements are unique, yet so often they get a cut and paste standard solution which increases their long term maintenance costs.

For example, Hurtwood have been implementing the use of adiabatic cooling and humidification with a number of Legionella risk monitoring systems to ensure the effective use of this low Energy System and developing the concept of lower cost heat distribution networks to improve the efficient use of heat from resources such as Biomass boilers and CHP plants.

As well as our core competences of building management systems including the preparation of detailed specifications for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, we can produce specifications for ventilation and heating works including steam systems and boilerhouses which has led us, for example, to file patents for an improved design of hot well de-aerator and an improved solar hot water heating system and an innovative over-feed stoker for a biomass boiler.

Management and maintenance

Hurtwood can assist organisations in ensuring that they get the most from their BMS maintenance and renewals arrangements. We can analyse maintenance activity that is being carried on the BMS and look at how effectively it is assisting the in house maintenance staff.

Integration

Packaged Handling Units

Hurtwood have integrated several packaged air handling units into wider BMS Systems using communications such as Modbus.

In addition, we have helped organisations transfer control from proprietary control systems for air handling units to their native BMS, eliminating the need for expensive additional maintenance contracts and the operating issues often experienced with proprietary control systems.

Often, this has been driven by the obsolescence of the original control system and the difficulties of supporting it. Most recently we have carried out some work transferring the control of some Swegon units at a university campus to a Cylon BMS & some Menerga units within an art gallery onto a Tridium BMS. This has allow the implementation of far more energy efficient operating strategies for the plant.

Variable Speed Drives

Hurtwood Have interfaced with a large number of different VSDs using a Modbus fieldbus to allow the considerable amount of data within VSD is to be extracted and used for monitoring the health of the motors and predicting failure before it actually occurs.

Biomass boilers

Hurtwood have been working to improve the control and monitoring of several biomass boiler installations across Bristol.

Hurtwood have developed the expertise to communicate directly with several major biomass boiler control systems including Binder and KWB. This direct communication allows all the operating parameters of the biomass boiler to be monitored far more effectively and failure can be predicted before it occurs ensuring that the biomass boiler has a much greater availability and hence earning more valuable RHI credits. Warnings and alarms can be emailed out to building operators and specialist contractors that so often look after biomass boilers.

In addition to an improved understanding of what the biomass boiler is doing, Hurtwood are experts in optimising the utilisation of heat from biomass boilers in the associated heating circuits and therm-stores and have analysed many different types of biomass boiler heating interface and made significant improvements as well as, in some cases resolving longstanding issues that had prevented the biomass boiler from running at all.

In all the above areas of expertise, we can assist local maintenance contractors to implement far better monitoring and management of mechanical services and in some cases we can carry this work out directly ourselves.