Mar 1
Glyn Goodwin FRSA, founder the 10,000, co-founder the COP26 Climate Action Plan, winner of the Mayor’s special award for tackling Climate change explores the benefits of Hydromx
As the looming energy crunch beckons, with the energy price cap increase in April, adding an average of £700 to annual bills, energy solutions are welcome. I have been working with Lava.eco, who have a heat transfer fluid, Hydromx which significantly upgrades your heating system. The headline is striking. Hydromx reduces heating emissions by around 30%.
Gas boilers emit an average of 2.8 tonnes of CO2e, our homes in London cause 50% of emissions so cutting that is huge. This is from the website:
Does it work and how?
A climate solution which will help cut energy bills, what is not to like? We should all be sceptical of claims made about anything with so much greenwashing around.
The FAQ’s on the Lava.eco site give a good overview with case studies.
I’m sure your boiler manufacturer will have told you how efficient your combi boiler is but the truth is that they are only optomising their efficiency when they are condensing, which is not often. It is like the mileage you see car manufacturers claiming, all well and good in test conditions, but in the real world? Very different. Efficiency drops dramatically from the claimed 95%
What Hydromx does is to cleverly utilise this inefficiency making the boiler work at close to its optimum range much more of the time. Its heat transfer properties extract heat from the boiler more efficiently and moves it to the radiators faster, meaning your home warms up quicker and the boiler then turns itself off, job done.
But that is not all, because it has transferred the heat to where you want it more effectively, when the Hydromx gets back to the boiler it is colder than water would have been, thereby enabling the condenser to work. Technically it means the dew point is reached more often and the condenser gives another 7–10% efficiency saving. With Hydromx this is much more likely to happen and so it forms a virtuous circle, the boiler working for less time but more efficiently, closer to its optimum level.
As a registered inhibitor it protects your system too, the reaction of oxygen and metal clogging the system, eventually doing for most boilers. Hydromx cunningly uses soft water which largely eliminates calcification. There is a 20 year warranty so the manufacturers are confident.
I wanted to know where it had been installed though. If it is this good why isn’t it everywhere? The reason is quite arcane; the product has not yet been through building regs. Why? Simply because UK building regulations(BREEAM) currently do not have a test for nano fluids.
However HydroMx has a Lifecycle Carbon Assessment (LCA)and an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD).
While this is not common terminology it means that they would gain up to 10 points in global building standard LEED. It has been steadily gaining recognition in the USA and Asia.
The most iconic installation has been the Empire State Building, presumably while king Kong was not hanging off it. This has led to a huge emissions reduction of 26.8%, reaching their ten year climate target in one fell swoop! In 2020 Hydromx won the Carbon neutrality innovation challenge, all very impressive. I looked further and amongst the studies were some in the UK, showing substantial savings with paybacks sometimes under two years. In 2016, Hydromx was awarded the European Environmental Award on Eco-Innovation.
The proof is in the pudding.
As a climate change campaigner, getting 12,300 people to demand Wandsworth Council declare a Climate Emergency, I had been asked the question many times, ‘what can they do, what can we do?’
That is a long and complex conversation, I had looked at installing a heat pump, but as with many London flats or tight budgets it really isn’t an option. Solar had its subsidies removed and is quite pricey, so for those wanting ‘to do the right thing’ and cut emissions, with a payback time of 4–5 years, Hydromx looked like the best ‘bang for buck’ solution by far.
Hydromx ticks lots of the boxes: reducing emissions, reducing air pollution, creating greater comfort and warming homes faster to boot.
It covers both commercial and domestic use. I decided to put my money where my mouth is and booked to have it installed.
Measuring success
Measuring in real situations can be tricky. Even over a year there might be significant differences: how cold was it? How the home was used? Covid has changed many aspects of behaviour too.
I decided to ask Crew Energy to come and do some thermal imaging, to test if the product works as stated, to measure temperatures over a time range from a variety of radiators from completely cold to ‘phew scorchio’.
All good plans are subject to ‘Sods law’ though and the day before installation was due, my boiler gave up the ghost.
It was 15 years old and had been playing up, so it wasn’t wholly unexpected. It just complicated things a little. A new boiler was installed.
Pavol power flushed the system, ridding it of magnetite. You don’t want to install a super fluid in a dirty system after all.
Power flushing can show up all sorts of things, leaks which are only blocked by gunk etc, but there were none in my system, thankfully. I already had thermostatic valves but got two new radiator valves fitted which were leaking beforehand. Thermostatic valves can cut heating costs substantially, why pay to heat rooms you are not in?
A special low pressure centrifugal pump was used to deliver the pink Hydromx into the system. It didn’t take long, then the radiators were bled as per the instructions and the system balanced, adding more Hydromx. The remaining water was bled off.
We measured with a refractometer to get optimum concentration.
And then? Drumroll…
Instantly the heating was turned on the difference was staggering. I had been informed that instead of it being convective heat, like average radiators, it used radiative heat and the difference was very noticeable.
It also heated up really quickly.
My son started complaining it was too hot despite his room having a comically small radiator in his room. I turned the temperature down from the recomended 60 to 40. It was still toasty.
A friend without Hydromx but exactly the same boiler has it going at 75 and it is still cold, albeit with a different house layout, size, insulation etc . I now have better heating for less energy used.
I don’t know yet what the savings will be over time, and the calculation is quite difficult with many variables but the change is already noticeable.
Contemplating the payback time is something of a double edge sword: the higher gas prices go the quicker the payback time. It looks like payback will be ‘faster than expected’.
Overall, I would say just on the level of undefinable comfort factor, this makes a huge difference. Looking at it analytically as a climate solution that cuts emissions and pays for itself, it is a no brainer. With energy prices on the rise it means that it pays for itself in perhaps 2–3 years.
That is some cheering news to brighten our days!
