District Heating Metering & Billing Consultancy
District Heating (also known as District Energy or Communal Heating) can offer a low-carbon and cost-effective way of delivering heat to residential and commercial premises. The use of this heating solution is growing rapidly in the UK due to the increasing pressure to decarbonise, often manifesting in ever more stringent planning requirements
However, the district heating sector has a bad reputation because of high bills, poor service and unreliable supply. This is because:
- Some housing developers (and their contractors/consultants), if they are honest, do not understand what they are building when delivering a district heating network and how to ensure that the scheme is operating correctly. Particularly if they have not used this method of heating before
- Customer service and billing arrangements, including even setting what the charges should be, are often left to very late in the development process because it is not seen as a priority ,
- Allied to this is that many building developers and their contractors would prefer to install in dwelling solutions (i.e. individual gas fired boilers) and not district heating
- As a result bad design is often the outcome which leads to poor system performance and higher than expected operating costs for operators and their customers.
- Lastly, even if they embrace district heating and employ a qualified designer often many contractors do not take the care required to install the network and the in-dwelling systems correctly, particularly when it comes to the detailed commissioning of the systems. We often hear that “so long as it gets hot then its OK” – unfortunately not.
It does NOT need to be like this
All the above problems can be avoided and district energy schemes can deliver on their promises of low carbon energy and fair charges to their customers.
MABAS can help you do this and ensure that you have a system:
- with minimised heat losses and maximised use of low carbon energy
- which can operate to deliver accurate bills and fair charges to customers
To do this MABAS provides the following consultancy services:
district Heating – Design Phase
- Technical Specifications – creating and/or reviewing the metering and billing elements of your technical specifications to ensure they are fit for purpose
- Options Analysis – helping you review the options available to select the metering and billing systems that are fit for your development
Development Phase
- Metering – selecting and setting up your metering system and ensuring you have accurate meter readings
- Billing – setting tariffs, and developing systems to generate bills and revenue collections,
- Customer Documentation – commenting on and providing standard from of supply agreements, standards of service and the various customer documents
district heating – Operational Phase
- Meter read analysis – a full diagnosis of your district heating system using the metering system to determine what is working and what is not
- Secondary loss calculations – is the heat network operating efficiently?
- Operational Delivery – hand holding and 24/7 support to ensure that you have an efficient and well run metering and billing system
- Metering & Billing Customer Service and Billing Agency
Please see our Experience pages to see how this has been put into practice.
Over the years we have also built up a network of highly skilled and experienced colleagues who can further extend these services to include all aspects of a district heating scheme including:
- Business development
- Business planning and strategic thinking
- Financial modelling
- Technical design, analysis and advice
- Legal advice
Get in touch for a no obligation friendly chat.
MABAS is a member of the UKDEA