A new guide from the Carbon Trust advises businesses how to cut energy bills by reducing wasted heat in buildings.
The Heat recovery - A guide to key systems and applications includes a checklist and examples of best practice on how heat recovery can help to reduce wasted energy from ventilation systems, boiler gases, air compressors and refrigeration equipment.

Richard Rugg, director of Carbon Trust programmes, said: 'Waste heat and you are wasting money. Even though it's been slightly warmer outside, there's still plenty of opportunity to make heat savings inside. From office-based businesses to retailers and manufacturers, there are significant opportunities to recover and reuse heat, save money and boost your bottom line.'

The guide is available from the Carbon Trust website and includes a range of useful tips on heat recovery applications in industry:

Refrigeration:
· In a typical supermarket heat recovered from refrigeration units could be used to provide 75-90 per cent of the building's hot water needs - equivalent to 2-3 per cent of its total CO₂ emissions.
· For a typical new build 250-person office, installing a de-superheater to capture heat from cooling equipment could cut £1,000 from gas bills by providing energy for space heating.
· Server rooms produce a significant amount of heat and where refrigerant cooling is used the resulting waste heat from the condensing units can be reused elsewhere in the building, such as for heating water.

Boilers:
· Using recovered heat to raise the combustion air temperature of a boiler by 20°C increases boiler efficiency by 1 per cent.
· Boilers lose on average 25 per cent of their heat. Investing £6-8,000 on installing boiler flue economisers in an office with an annual energy spend of £15,000 could see a payback in four years.

Ventilation:
· Thermal wheel technology, a heat transfer system based on a rotating wheel with high thermal capacity, can typically recover 65-75 per cent of the heat from a ventilation system, and could pay back your investment within two years.
· Similarly fitting a 70 per cent efficient plate heat exchanger in a typical office could cut your total gas consumption by 38 per cent.

Industrial processes:
· Most of the electricity supplied to an air compressor is converted to heat. It is possible to recover anywhere from 50 per cent to 90 per cent of this thermal energy and use it to heat workspace air or water.
· In the dairy industry, pasteurisation is already highly efficient in terms of heat recovery; however sterilisation, particularly bottle sterilisation, is energy intensive and provides a greater opportunity for waste heat recovery.

Carbon Trust is also running a free webinar on 8 September for smaller scale manufacturing and warehousing businesses which will show employers how to cut bills by up to 30 per cent. To sign up click here: http://www.carbontrust.co.uk/events/listings/Pages/heat-recovery-webinar.aspx

For more information on heat recovery click here.
http://www.carbontrust.co.uk/cut-carbon-reduce-costs/products-services/technology-advice/pages/heat-recovery.aspx