The Winds of Winter – Do They Affect Your Heating?

Unless, you’ve been exceptionally fortunate, you can’t help but have noticed the effects of Hurricane Gonzalo as the aftermath of this huge storm swept through the UK earlier this week. According to the BBC, gusts of wind of up to 70mph in strength were recorded in several areas such as North Wales, and severe wind warnings have remained in place for much of the country. We should count ourselves lucky in the UK that we usually only get the ‘tail-end’ of such stormy behemoths, but the problem of wind is an omnipresent one, and it can make a difference to your heating strategy too.

With winter approaching, it’s fairly obvious that we’re set for colder temperatures in the near future. Thus far, we’ve done quite well, as September and October have been pretty mild for the most part. However, it’s a well-known fact that wind chill can make a difference to the temperature, but you may not quite realise just how large that change can be.

How Wind Chill Works

When we’re outside, the air around us is usually much lower than the core temperature of our bodies, so any area of us that isn’t shielded by clothing tends to lose heat by the simple process of convection. However, when a cold wind hits us we begin to lose heat as a result of conduction instead, and our skin cools to the temperature of the air around us. Rain will further exacerbate this effect. In simple terms, the wind makes our skin lose its heat far more quickly, resulting in us feeling temperatures as several degrees colder than they actually are.

Warming Up

Of course, this sort of weather means that some very cold office workers and the like will be trudging their way into many premises around the country, and so your industrial heaters and the like need to be prepared to keep the working temperatures comfortable. It’s best not to warm chilly people up too quickly though. In the most excessive cases – we’re talking those that lead to hypothermia – warming the extremities too swiftly can actually be very dangerous, but even in more normal cases you shouldn’t make the temperature in your premises so warm that it comes as a real ‘shock’ to those who walk in.

Draughts

However, the wind potentially causes other heating problems too. When you’re talking about gale force gusts of wind, even a tiny cranny in a building that lets in a draught can soon be permitting a lot of cold air to come inside, and that will obviously stymie your heating strategy if you don’t sort it out. We’ve already covered the various strategies that you can use to minimise the effects of draught in the workplace, but you also need to be aware that such problems will greatly affect the efficiency of your heating systems too.

When your employees feel a draught, they’ll naturally reach for the thermostat to turn the heating up, and you’ll end up running your heaters at very high temperatures… which in turn will become an issue for those who aren’t situated in the air flow of the draught. However efficient your heating systems are, they’ll still use lots of energy when they’re in use, and having invasive draughts will make that use far more frequent, and also put greater strain on those heaters as they struggle to heat up a premise that is literally ‘leaking heat’.

Here at Heritage Heating and Cooling, we know all about industrial heating and the like, so we’re well placed to provide you with all of the efficient heating systems that you’re likely to need this winter.  What’s more, we can also maintain these solutions as well, allowing them to keep up with the demand that’s placed on them far more easily. If you’d like to find out more, contact us today by calling 01509 814 123 or emailing info@heritageheatingandcooling.co.uk.