General Overview of WarmTronics, our journey and why we believed a new innovative solution is required to the existing portable heating options.
Whilst working in facilities management for 10 years, overseeing a National distribution customer’s warehouses, the common problem of keeping the team warm during the Winter became an occurring annual challenge.
We found that there were a few different solutions;
Firstly, a number of the buildings had large gas blowers in the corner, or mounted on the ceiling, however these created heat that rose to the top of the warehouse and leaked out of the roof. They are also very expensive to run and also can often be very nosy.
We then trialled fan heaters similar to this at the workstations. These fan heaters heat the air, so we found that they were wasting energy as the hat rises away from the desk up to the roof of the warehouse.
We then trialled radiant lamp heaters like this, which provided immediate heat, but were very expensive to run. They also use a large amount of electricity, so we found that they’d trip the electrics if the load calculations hadn’t been done correctly.
We then set about designing:
- A heater that is low voltage and doesn’t use much electricity
- A heater that warms the person, rather than the air
- A heater that is portable
- A heater that includes an anti-fatigue mat, to save having to buy one in addition
- A heater that can simply be plugged into a normal 3 pin plug socket, rather than needing an electrician to install
Once we built the first Warmtronics Prototype to trial with customers, this is what we found:
By way of comparison, we’ve set up a Watt Meter here with all three types of portable heaters:
Fan Heater: 2000 Watts:
Radiant Heater: 3000 Watts:
Warmtronics Heat Mat: 220 Watts
If we were to take a cost of electricity at £0.30 per Kwh, this would mean an 8 hour shift with these heaters turned on would cost an estimated:
Fan Heater: 2072 Watts @ £0.30 per Kwh for 8 hours would be £4.97 per working day, which is £107 per month
Radiant Heater: 2984 Watts @ £0.30 per Kwh 8 for hours would be £7.16 per working day, which is £155 per month
Warmtronics Heat Mat: 214 Watts @ £0.30 per 8 Kwh for hours would be £0.51 per working day, which is £11 per month
Potential saving of £4.46 or £6.65 per day, if the Warmtronics Heat Mat is used instead.
The customer we were running our trials with had 50 workstations in their warehouse, running 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. After running the customers trials we were astonished by the potential energy savings:
50 Radiant Heaters that are 3000 Watts, running 24/7 for 1 Month, cost them an estimated: £32,500 per month in electricity. Whereas running 50 Warmtronics Heat Mats that are 220 Watts, running the same 24/7 for 1 Month, cost them an estimated: £2,500 per month in electricity
That is a potential saving of over £30,000 per month, which over a 6 Month Winter period represents a potential energy saving of £180,000 per annum.
Payback 1 Month
Model used in the video is the Warmtronics Heat Mat WTHM_01
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