New year, new solutions

With updates to Part F (Means of Ventilation) of the Building Regulations due to be implemented in 2010, Steve Mongan, Head of Marketing at Xpelair Ventilation Solutions, explains how whole house ventilation systems will benefit both wholesalers and their installer customers in the long run.

With changes taking place to Part F just around the corner, it is important that the industry gets to grips with the revisions as soon as possible to ensure we have the appropriate information and skills prior to the document being published. The good news from a wholesaler’s point of view is that the new regulations offer a window of opportunity for them to up-sell products to installers and maximise revenue.

The reason for this is that Part F stresses the importance of ensuring buildings are airtight to provide comfortable indoor air quality for a home or non-domestic dwelling. Therefore, it is critical that the right system is specified for each individual application and with a number of holistic packages available on the market; wholesalers can now use the regulations to sell innovative solutions such as whole house heat recovery systems with the additional costs being passed onto the end user by the installer.

As one of the UK’s leading ventilation manufacturers, Xpelair is making it a priority to flag up these new legislative changes to wholesalers and installers and suggest realistic solutions. Updates to Part F include greater ventilation provisions recommended for buildings with design air permeability tighter than or equal to 5m3/(h.m2) at 50Pa. Going hand in hand with Part L (Conservation of Fuel and Power), each building will also require its own individual solution, catered to its surroundings and helping to achieve the required 25% reduction in carbon emissions.

Installers, specifiers and contractors now have the added pressure to meet the high standards of European legislation that are coming into force in the UK. Far from seeing this as a negative, those wholesalers who grasp the imitative can use this as an opportunity to provide both technical advice and guidance to meeting regulations to help their customers specify the right kit for the job.

The rise of centralised systems
Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery (MVHR) is a growing area of the ventilation market based on the energy savings, higher performance and more aesthetically pleasing features to help installers meet legislative changes. Many wholesalers are becoming increasingly aware of this and are realising the need to expand their offering to provide a wider range of solutions to installers that will help boost their own revenue.

However, the move away from traditional AC driven intermittent ventilation to these whole house systems has its own learning curve. Ultimately, installing a ventilation system is a specialist area and with these newer regulations it makes it more complicated to install. This gives wholesalers the chance to give additional advice and support when approached by their installer customers. Aspects such as flexible ducting, along with unplanned designs and ducting routes are the common pitfalls in applications utilising such systems.

This being said, wholesalers can pass on knowledge of central extract systems when installers come to purchase these solutions by suggesting ideas such as rigid ducting and structured ducting routes to prevent issues such as leaking and restricted air flow that can occur if poorly installed.

As these systems continuously extract stale air from wet rooms at a very low background rate, it makes their operation almost undetectable to the user. The appeal of these noise-reducing options means this will be more attractive to contractors and end users, meaning more installers need to get to grips with the types of systems on the market to maximise their own return.

Overall, I believe that those wholesalers who go above and beyond by providing a wide offering of products to cater towards the strict guidelines that installers now have to meet, and also becoming a source of knowledge to their customers wanting to understand the benefits of such solutions as centralised extract systems will benefit the most.

Fit for purpose
However, it is not solely down to the wholesalers and their installer customers to adopt the high standards for ventilation now expected within the Building Regulations in 2010. Manufacturers have an obligation to ensure energy efficient ventilation solutions such as whole house systems are readily available.

Wholesalers can have peace of mind that Xpelair is reliable and trustworthy as a ventilation manufacturer; ensuring delivery of product ranges will be on time and ongoing demand available to distributors nationwide.

As a company with over 50 years of experience in the HVAC sector, Xpelair has pioneered some of the most innovative ventilation products currently available on the market suitable for domestic, commercial and industrial applications and we constantly aim to raise the bar in the industry.

We have a dedicated team of technical experts on hand to assist with anything from product specification to installation issues and we are constantly expanding our offering so that wholesalers will benefit from a wide selection of extensive ventilation solutions and expert training. We have met the demands for more energy efficient product solutions helping to reduce carbon emissions with the launch of the CarbonLite range of ventilation systems. Designed to specifically lower energy usage and extend the motor life of a ventilation system, we have ensured that these innovative solutions provide competitive whole life costs and will continue to provide the range of products which our customers have come to expect.