Developed specifically around UK heat networks, RavenWatch turns complex performance data into a simple view of where networks are performing well, where attention is needed and where further savings can be found.
RavenWatch provides a real-time view of network performance, allowing energy and building managers to identify problems earlier, prepare for HNTAS (Heat Network Technical Assurance Scheme) compliance and continually optimise how their networks operate.
The expected HNTAS standards aim to ensure that heat networks across the UK meet higher standards of reliability and efficiency for consumers, and specify the need for comprehensive monitoring. At the same time, heat networks have come under Ofgem regulation for the first time, bringing consumer protection closer into line with other regulated utilities.
But consumer protection is not only about what happens when something goes wrong. It is also about making sure heat networks deliver what they promise in the first place: reliable, low-cost, low-carbon heat. That depends on networks continuing to perform well throughout their operating life.
RavenWatch has been developed around these changing requirements and the practical realities of managing UK heat networks, with input from those working across the sector.
Its design deliberately keeps much of the technical complexity in the background. Rather than presenting users with large volumes of engineering data, the dashboard provides a simple view of the measures that matter: where a network is performing as it should, where attention may be required and where there are opportunities to improve performance further.
The software monitors key plant equipment including heat pumps, CHPs, electric boilers, gas boilers and other critical assets, alongside performance measures such as return temperature, heat loss, bypass and connectivity. It can provide analysis from an individual dwelling through to block, site and portfolio level.
“There is little value in collecting more data if only a handful of people can understand it,” commented Lukas Fabricius, Product Manager at SAV. “We wanted RavenWatch to take something technically complicated and make it useful. You should be able to open the dashboard and understand how your network is performing, where the opportunities are and what needs attention. The more technical analysis can happen in the background.”
Fabricius continued: “There is also a consumer protection argument at the heart of this. If we are asking people to rely on heat networks for an essential service, those networks have to deliver. They need to be reliable, they need to keep costs under control and they need to deliver the carbon savings they were designed to achieve. Good monitoring gives operators the information they need to make sure that happens.”
“This is a critical moment for heat networks and operators. Heat network consumers are now coming under Ofgem protection and the industry is preparing for HNTAS. That is a welcome development, but regulation alone cannot make networks perform better. Operators need the information to understand what is happening across the system and the tools to act on it.”
From monitoring to optimisation
One of the great strengths of a heat network is that it operates as an interconnected energy system. It enables buildings and neighbourhoods to make use of large-scale, renewable and otherwise wasted sources of heat that would simply not be available to individual homes.
That interconnectedness also creates another opportunity: the network can be managed and continually improved as a whole.
Good monitoring is therefore not simply about identifying faults or avoiding inefficiency. Once operators can see how heat is being generated, distributed and used across a network, they can begin to optimise it: reducing temperatures and flow rates where appropriate, lowering heat losses and pumping requirements, improving the performance of heat generation and finding incremental savings throughout the system.
Those improvements can add up.
In one 130-home scheme, monitoring identified two apartments with unusually high bypass flow. Correcting this reduced flow through the two apartments from around 130 litres per hour to an average of just 4 litres per hour.
The resulting reduction in heat loss was worth approximately £6,000 a year at a heat tariff of 15 pence per kWh – equivalent to around £46 for every dwelling on the network – before taking into account the additional reduction in pumping costs.
“The opportunity is not simply to fix things when they go wrong,” Fabricius explained. “Once you can see how a network is performing in detail, you can keep improving it. Small changes to flow, temperatures and operation can compound across hundreds of homes, steadily reducing the cost of running the network and, ultimately, the cost of heat for consumers.”
This is an important difference between a heat network and hundreds of individual homes each operating their own heating system. A well-designed and well-operated heat network has the opportunity to perform far more efficiently because generation, distribution and demand can be considered together, rather than one property at a time.
Ensuring those benefits are actually realised for the people connected to the network is itself an important part of consumer protection. A network may have been designed to provide low-cost, low-carbon heat, but that promise depends on how well it continues to operate year after year.
It also moves much of the technical burden away from the consumer. Rather than relying on each resident to recognise that something is wrong and call a plumber, a network operator can increasingly identify poor performance centrally – sometimes before the resident is even aware of it – and can also identify opportunities to make an already functioning system perform better.
“With individual boilers, we tend to think about maintenance as fixing something when it breaks,” Fabricius added. “A heat network gives us the opportunity to think differently. With good data and proactive management, you can continually tune the system to perform better. That is where monitoring starts to become really valuable: not simply preventing waste, but finding opportunities to reduce the underlying cost of delivering heat.”
A better picture of UK heat networks
The launch comes as the UK begins a major expansion of heat networks as part of the transition away from individual gas boilers.
“Moving from gas to electricity isn’t simply a matter of replacing one piece of equipment with another,” Fabricius said. “We increasingly need to think about buildings and neighbourhoods as energy systems, and understand how generation, storage, distribution, ventilation and demand work together.
“Heat networks have the potential to be considerably more efficient than the systems they replace, but that performance does not happen automatically. It comes from good design, good operation and the ability to understand what the network is doing. That is the gap RavenWatch has been designed to help close.
“If heat networks are going to play a much bigger role in the way Britain heats its homes, consumers need to have confidence that they will deliver what was promised: reliable heat, at a fair cost, with lower carbon emissions. Making that performance visible is an important part of building that confidence.”
RavenWatch is available for all heat networks at a cost of £7 per meter per year. It currently encompasses 12,860 monitoring points across UK heat networks and, as coverage grows, will provide an increasingly detailed picture of how heat networks are performing across the country.
“As RavenWatch develops, we can move beyond simply understanding technical performance towards understanding much more clearly what that performance means for the price of heat,” Fabricius added. “That gives operators another tool to find efficiencies, manage their networks better and ultimately reduce costs for consumers.”
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