Wilo Wins Corgi Award for Energy Efficiency Initiative of the Year 2008

Leading European pump manufacturer Wilo has won another award! Wilo UK, based in Burton on Trent, is on something of a roll in the awards stakes and has added a CORGI award to the others it has recently won here in the UK. It won the Energy Efficiency Initiative of the Year Award for its on-going pump replacement project at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth where its work has seen savings of over £50,000 on the NHS Trusts electricity bill from the project to date. The awards were held at the Installer Live! Exhibition at Coventry’s Ricoh Arena recently.

Wilo recognises that there are energy users operating in the NHS and other public sector areas that are, to a degree, 'lumbered' with 'elderly' energy guzzling pumps to drive their plant rooms. A typical major hospital will have between ten and twenty plant rooms and most hospitals have old fashioned, uncontrolled, maintenance costly pumps and pumping systems, to pump hot water around their buildings. Replacement with modern energy efficient pumps that operate only when they are needed, can provide substantially reduced energy bills, simply by switching from the current elderly pumps to new, high efficiency pumps.

Wilo decided to mount an environmentally driven initiative offering a free initial audit of the pumps on a development and a free replacement pump proposal to show the NHS Trust or organisation in question how much they could save by replacing old with new. The first project involved work undertaken with Derriford Hospital in Plymouth. This initiative saw Wilo catalogue the existing pumps there and select new Wilo high efficiency equivalents. Wilo then calculated the energy costs associated with the old and the new pumps.

In many cases, Wilo's new generation pumps can save up to 80% of the energy being used by the older pumps, and of course reduce both CO² emissions and the increasingly expensive maintenance costs, as well as avoiding the reliability problems that old pumps can bring with them.

Wilo needed a partner to work with as the stockist and supplier of the new pumps and spares and it has entered into a partnership with Industrial Heating and Mechanical Services distributor BSS to provide the support required for each contract.

Wilo provided an accurate assessment of the savings that could be made by installing the new Wilo high efficiency pumps. This saving obviously had to be offset against the capital outlay required to purchase the new pumps, but Wilo has found circumstances where the outlay can be saved in energy cost savings in the first year! As you would expect, the most significant saving can be made on the older pumps and the pumps with largest motor sizes as often pumps have been over specified and the pumps rarely need to operate at full capacity.

Typically payback periods for the new pumps range from 4 months up to several years. Those offering payback periods of just a few months, tend to allow replacements very quickly as they show a saving in that financial year. The strategy will also quickly show reduced running costs due to reduced maintenance.

Using the Derriford Hospital project as a reference point, the replacement pump programme to date has already saved the hospital and the NHS Trust in excess of £48,000 a year on its electricity bill, and this will grow as the replacement programme continues. Wilo believes that the potential savings of this initiative could run into several hundreds of thousands of pounds savings a year in energy bills and equivalent reductions in CO² emissions.

The project has seen the replacement of a number of elderly, energy guzzling pumps at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth with a selection of Wilo’s new, energy efficient pumps, which to date have already saved the Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust around £30,000 a year on their electricity bill, with the potential to save even more as the on-going programme to replace existing pumps continues. The total savings on energy bills since the rolling project began was around £48,000 (at the end of July 2008).

Norman Spiller at Plymouth Hospital NHS Trust, is the man responsible for the project: “To be able to have an impact on the running costs of the hospital in such a positive way is great for all of us involved. Keeping the hospital running day to day is difficult enough, but when the opportunity arises to become involved in a proactive activity like this, backed by BSS and Wilo who know their stuff, it’s a great feeling of achievement.”

Manager of BSS Plymouth Branch, Jeremy Tucker, says their involvement was very rewarding: “To be part of a team that can have such a positive outcome for the local hospital is very rewarding for all the team here at BSS. We work closely with Wilo UK and knew that their new high efficiency pump range offered a very real opportunity for Derriford Hospital to reduce its costs. Although there is a cost involved in replacing these pumps, meaning we cannot replace all the pumps in one go, in some cases we have been able to replace a pump and see the cost of that pump covered by the pay back period of less than six months of energy savings.”

The replacement project continues at Derriford Hospital, phase one is complete and phase two is underway, resulting in even greater energy savings in the months ahead.