The assistant behind the counter says: “A gramophone!?”
Man: “Yes”
Assistant: “Ha, ha, so you want to buy a gramophone then, grandad?”
Man: “Yes, please.”
Assistant: “And what sort of gramophone would you like to buy then?”
Man: “An oil fired single stage, fixed output, on/off, package gramophone, please.”
Assistant: “I’m sorry, grandad, but they were legislated out of existence years ago!”
Man: “Realy? Why?”
Assistant: “Well you know your old 78 controls that just let the gramophone run at full speed whenever you turned it on? Well there were also 45 and 33 control systems which the gas gramophones could use to use less energy and get even better quality output – they called them modulating record players and they could use modulating motors to pump the music around the house as well.”
Man: “Oh, so why didn’t the oil gramophone manufacturers use 45 and 33 control systems?”
Assistant: “Good question. Well, as far as we can tell they were so busy trying to keep their old gramophone design that they even bolted them into electric heaters and/or fridges and sometimes tried to get record player suppliers to sell electric heaters and fridges to their customers. Oh, and you won’t believe this but some oil gramophone manufacturers even suggested that we should start cutting down trees and burning them instead of selling the customer the oil record player that they could afford and actually wanted!”
Man: “Silly buggers!”
Assistant: “Yep, and because they insisted on trying to keep to their old ineffective and inefficient 78s and ignored the 45s and 33s. The music police legislated them out of existence!”
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Food for thought, and a light-hearted overview of hopefully only an imaginary future for the domestic oil heating industry – or is it? This could have been a real potential future for the domestic oil heating industry had I not seen the new Sapphire blue flame modulating domestic oil burner running and in operation in the lab at EOGB Energy Products Ltd premises near St Neots in Cambridgeshire.
If this burner is adopted by domestic oil boiler manufacturers with its fully modulating blueflame Opentherm protocol operating system (as gas boilers have done for the last 10-15 years) industry could:
- reduce fuel consumption for customers in excess of that already achieved with condensing boilers,
- improve comfort levels in domestic dwellings which run on oil,
- enable the compliant installation of oil combination boilers which could at last actually be set so that the burner can fire at different outputs to match hot water, as well as heating full and part load demands instead of the all to common over-firing at hot water rates when running forheating only
- reduce running costs for fuel poor properties off the gas grid,
- enable the use of the higher efficiency equivalent modulating system controls (ErPD)
- enable the compliant use of modulating circulating pumps (i.e. not have to override the modulation of the circulating pump back to fixed speed to maintain flow rates) saving money and energy for customers,
- enable oil boilers to actually only burn the amounts of fuel necessary to satisfy demand,
- reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and
- provide a lower capital cost option replacement appliance than the use of bio-mass or hybrid technology appliances.
You never know such an incentive and progress in technology might even enable government to consider fiscal support for the industry once again! As ever there is always an alternative – if oil fired appliance manufacturers do not wish to adopt and embrace such technology then at least if the fitment of new oil boilers is legislated out in the UK (as other continental countries have already done) then the service engineer may in the future be able to make an honest shilling or two keeping his customers old boilers running by replacing the existing burners with this new technology.
