Belimo’s Energy Valve wins BCIA award
Belimo’s Energy Valve, which combines five functions to revolutionise flowrate regulation and hydraulic balancing, has received this year’s award from the Building Controls Industry Association for technical innovation of the year — products. This was one of nine awards, and this category was sponsored by Modern Building Services.
The Energy Valve is the next logical development of the electronically controlled, pressure-independent characterised control valve from Belimo, the EPIV. The new valve has the capabilities of measuring, controlling, balancing and bubble-tight shut-off within the one valve. Its fifth function is to show where energy is being used.
Energy Valves have a built-in web server, so the information can be accessed via a web browser or a building-management system. 13 months of data is stored and can be used to monitor and optimise the energy balance of a heating/cooling system in a targeted manner.
Combining all these functions into a 2-port valve simplifies installation and reduces costs. Hydraulic balancing is considerably simplified, taking one person less than a minute per line.
Nick Martin, senior applications engineer with Marflow Hydronics, has used the Energy Valve. He explains, ‘I selected this valve because it offered a particularly innovative solution that offers significant benefit in terms of ease of setting (through laptop) and incorporated flow measurement, to ease commissioning to a higher level of accuracy than an orifice plate. But the real benefit was the incorporated energy totalisation; this will provide our customers with the ability to directly measure the energy consumption of their chillers, and at no extra cost. Additionally the web-based interface allows the energy readings to be recorded without needing to alter our customer’s control scheme, a yearly visit with a laptop should be sufficient.’
