Electric Heating Installation for SnickersUK.com
The Client
Snickers Workwear is one of the world’s largest specialist workwear manufacturers with locations all over the UK. Juice Electrical were commissioned to deliver this project at one of their distribution warehouses in Hailsham.
The Challenge
The brief for the project was to keep the workforce in this busy distribution centre warm while keeping running costs to a minimum. At that point, the warehouse had no heating at all. So, conditions for the workforce were far from ideal in the colder weather.
On the face of it, this sounds like a relatively straightforward challenge. Designing a new system from scratch, which best met their needs.
But distribution centres are usually large buildings full of racking and product, with a handful of workers based at one or more workstations dispersed around the warehouse. This means that using fan heaters for space heating is both impractical and costly as vast sections of the building do not require direct heating.
The Solution
Juice Electrical reviewed the heating options available and advised that the most cost-effective method of keeping staff warm in this type of space is to spot heat individual workstations with quartz halogen heaters.
These heat people directly without warming the surrounding air. This means you can focus the heaters over a workstation to keep a specific worker warm and comfortable. As the impact of the heaters is felt instantly there is no warm-up time required, which keeps running costs to a minimum.
The Outcome
Juice successfully installed two BN Thermic 1.5kW Shortwave Infrared Halogen Heaters over the order input station, which usually has two workers present. These are controlled by a 2-gang switch and a dimmer. The work took a single day (10 hours in total) and caused minimal disruption to the client as it was carried out on a Saturday.
The new heaters have delivered a range of benefits, including:
- Greater efficiency as 95% of output translates into usable infrared energy.
- A significant reduction in running costs as the switch allows the user to activate the heaters only when a workstation is occupied.
- More flexibility in warmer weather via use of the dimmer switch to reduce the output of the heaters when less heat is required.
- Greater comfort levels all year round, based on an efficient system designed for easy use in a busy industrial environment
And as a guide to the relatively low cost of this sort of heating, it is noteworthy that, on a standard energy tariff of 15p p/kWh, a 1.5kW quartz halogen heater costs only 22p an hour to run.
BN Thermic, market leaders in this field, said: ‘A cracking install from our friends at @ElectricalJuice! Keeping staff warm with instantly effective shortwave quartz halogen heaters. Good stuff!’
Contact us to discuss how we can help heat your workspace more efficiently.