Adrian Acaster, managing director at Blades Low Carbon Systems, says his company has been designing, manufacturing and suppling bespoke hot and cold-water delivery systems for laundries for the past 10 years. “Our bespoke laundry systems are designed to ensure the modern commercial washer extractors operate at their optimum service levels allowing maximum returns to be achieved. To do this it is essential that the hot and cold-water supplies meet the required delivery standard in both quantity and temperature. Poor hot and cold-water delivery can seriously affect the production efficiency of the washer extractors and consequently the profitability of the company. Most laundries may be underperforming without even knowing it,” says Acaster.
“At Blades we analyse your requirements based on the machine specification and usage pattern with this data we can select the correct hot and cold-water system from our large range of products. Our water heaters can be used with either LPG or natural gas and is an ideal economic replacement for the traditional electric systems.”
The Blades water heaters can be supplied with 30kW to 230kW twin or single gas fired boilers, in conjunction with 100 litre to 500 litre hot water storage cylinders giving a range of model combinations to suit each site. All models can be supplied with space heating connections if required.
Reducing carbon emissions
Blades says it understand the issues of climate change and has always been at the forefront of trying to provide heating and hot water equipment which reduces carbon emissions while appreciating the commercial considerations to maintain a viable business and service level strategy. “To this end our gas fired boiler systems are available with flue energy recovery systems and are currently the most carbon reducing commercial gas fired systems on the market, reducing both fuel costs and carbon emissions increasing the gas boiler system efficiency to 97%,” says Acaster.
“We are all aware at the present time it is impractical to rely on locally produced renewable energy to supply hot water for a commercial building where a continuous supply of hot water is required to enable the building to function. Therefore, a continuous form of energy from the national grid is required, be it gas or electricity, to ensure a reliable supply of hot water is always available. However, at Blade we have developed hybrid systems which allow the integration of renewable systems with gas boiler so when there is renewable energy available it supplements the energy input to the gas boiler saving both fuel and carbon emissions otherwise the gas boiler supplies the total requirements, in this way we are moving towards a greener environment without compromising the laundry operation.”
Future developments
Current laundry equipment uses large quantities of gas and then discharges waste heat to the atmosphere so Blades says it is currently undertaking research into how best to reclaim waste energy from laundry equipment and use it to pre-heat the hot water system.
