Is it time to optimise your district heating network?

Identify high return temperature

Unexpected high return temperatures help identify installations with insufficient cooling. In Heat Intelligence, you easily filter out households with unexpected high return temperatures. This can be a result of heat installations that need to be adjusted or replaced, in order to reduce the unnecessary heat loss.

Simply click on each identified household with a high return temperature and dive into data showing not only the return temperature but also the volume of hot water delivered over time.

Now you can arrange with the consumer to go through their installations and solve the problems.

Locate unknown bypasses

With Heat intelligence, you can also identify households with very high supply temperatures and a high flow. This may indicate bypasses that lead heat around the household and back to the utility without delivering any energy to the household for heating. These bypasses will therefore need to be adjusted or removed.

Find poorly performing pipes

Heat Intelligence also lets you identify unexpected low supply temperatures in specific pipe sections. This may indicate a network section where the pipe insulation has been damaged and is causing unnecessary heat loss.

As a utility, you can either take action immediately or use the knowledge as valuable input for planning, repairing and maintaining the district heating distribution network.

Is the pressure too low?

A distribution network is being developed over many years with constant changes in heat consumption everywhere in the network and new households being added.

This may cause low pressure in different parts of the distribution network so that the utility can’t ensure sufficient heat to all of the households in the network.

With Heat Intelligence, you can search for households with too little differential pressure and you can search for pipe sections in the network with too low pressure or too much pressure loss. Identifying and repairing such bottlenecks in the distribution network will help you deliver sufficient heat at a lower supply temperature, thereby saving energy.

Poorly performing pipe sections and insufficient cooling

Unwanted low supply temperatures may be caused by a network section with pipes that are not performing sufficiently due to e.g. damaged insulation. Identifying and repairing or replacing such a section help diminishing waste heat and reduce unnecessary heat loss.

Heat Intelligence also allows you to identify households with high return temperature and dive into data showing not only the return temperature but also the volume of hot water delivered over time. By doing that you can identify households with insufficient cooling which might be caused by for example a defect heat installation.

By having access to data about the temperatures throughout the network, you can identify opportunities to mitigate heat loss and lowering the supply temperature.

See if differential pressure is too high

In Heat Intelligence you can see the absolute pressure as well as the differential pressure everywhere in the distribution network.

By simply searching for households and network sections with too high differential pressure, you get an overview of your opportunities to lower the pressure. Lowering pressure by turning down the speed of the pumps also helps you save energy.

Identify bottlenecks in the network

A pipe section can become a bottleneck when the pipe diameter is too small and therefore causes very high pressure loss. The pressure loss may be so significant that the pipe section can't move sufficient heated water to create the demanded heat output.

This will often force the utility to turn up the pumps to create enough flow to meet the demand for heated water. But since pressure loss grows exponentially with the increased flow, this is a costly way to solve the problem.

With Heat Intelligence, you can easily identify sections having trouble delivering enough heat and where the differential pressure is very low. Furthermore, you can identify network sections with very high pressure loss. This makes it easy to identify the reasons behind the problem and makes it easier to solve, for example, by replacing the bottleneck section with larger diameter pipes.

Heat Intelligence shows the whole district heating network on a map with all data values, and it enables the user to search for households or network sections where data indicates that something is wrong. For example, a household that sends back very hot water to the utility plant, indicating that, for example, the heat installation in that household does not work as it should.

The tool receives data about water flow, forward temperatures and return temperatures as well as pressure if available. Heat Intelligence uses these data to calculate pressure everywhere in the distribution network and pressure loss as well.

Heat Intelligence creates a digital model based on data about pipe dimensions, pipe isolation, pipe length, etc., everywhere in the distribution network. Based on these data, Heat Intelligence calculates how the distribution network ideally should function.

By comparing these calculated ideal values with the actual values collected from the meters in the network, Heat Intelligence can identify differences that can most likely be explained by errors or not optimal adjusted installations or network sections.

Not directly.

However, Heat Intelligence can help you qualify your search for possible leaks.

Because Heat Intelligence monitors temperatures in your distribution network, it can make you aware of network sections where the drop in temperature is much bigger than it should be.

This could indicate a possible leak or insolation that is not working as well as it should.

Yes, it can.

As an example, Heat Intelligence tells you how much pressure you have at your disposal in the network section that you’re planning to use for feeding the new area.

This way you will know if you have enough pressure and enough heat in that network section to deliver. Or if you should replace it with properly sized pipes or simply use another existing network section?

Besides that Heat Intelligence can help to monitor your network as you are adding new areas to it. Do bottlenecks occur? Do you still live up to your obligations regarding delivery of heat to each household?

Sure. For example, Heat Intelligence can help you identify network sections where you are losing too much heat. This can help you prioritise network sections where you will get the best return on your investment by replacing old sections with new ones.

Heat Intelligence needs GIS data about your distribution network, e.g., pipe dimensions, pipe insulation, pipe length, etc.

We will help you with uploading these data. Once the data are uploaded, Heat Intelligence will start receiving data from the meters.

If you have Kamstrup meters and are using READy, Heat Intelligence is quite easy to set up, and we will be happy to help you. We also train your users on how to use Heat Intelligence in their daily work.

If you would like to talk to us about Heat Intelligence, you can request a call-back right here.

You can use Heat Intelligence even if you’re not using Kamstrup meters.

As long as your meter supplier can export metering data to an FTP server, we can collect these data and import them into Heat Intelligence.

We will help you get your system up and running.