Twelve months into its initial programme of awareness raising in the UK, the OpenTherm Association has taken its first successful steps into the UK marketplace. As it begins its second year of activity, the Association is looking back over the first twelve months and sharing its plans for the second, assuming that the interruption of Covid-19 allows it to continue with its plans across the remainder of 2020. Already the virus has affected the opportunity to meet installers at exhibitions up and down the country that have been postponed or cancelled due to the lockdown issues across the UK.
The OpenTherm Association has introduced the OpenTherm protocol more widely in the UK and has launched an initial three-year communication process to raise awareness of the protocol, its benefits to the heating industry as a whole and to manufacturers and installers in particular. The OpenTherm protocol facilitates digital boiler modulation and as a result, load compensation requirements are met. The growth of the use of the OpenTherm protocol across the UK offers huge innovation potential. Looking ahead, a large installed base of OpenTherm compatible products could facilitate the implementation of a range of new solutions that could improve energy use, reduce the carbon footprint of a heating installation and reduce its total cost of ownership. Typical potential examples could see the increase in home automation and the availability of remote diagnostics for domestic installations.
The OpenTherm Association already has a number of members signed up to work with it to introduce a wider acceptance of OpenTherm as a standard in the UK – manufacturers of boilers and controls that have already evaluated the OpenTherm protocol’s compatibility with their systems include well-known names in the sector such as Ideal Boilers, InterGas, Honeywell Resideo, Danfoss, SALUS, ESi and Schneider Electric. Many other familiar names in the UK sector – major companies in Europe with an influence in the UK marketplace – may well combine to see the acceptance of the OpenTherm protocol, speeding up acceptance in the UK marketplace. Recognising the common sense in developing a common use ‘Open’ system here in the UK, the protocol importantly, also has the support of industry bodies HHIC and BEAMA who continue to be committed to supporting OpenTherm’s wider introduction here.
The OpenTherm Association is working on the introduction of an automated test tool that should be available for all member companies within the next few weeks, which will help address some of the incompatibility issues that some installers have experienced in trying to pair controls with boilers in the past few months: “This is a major plus for OpenTherm and will certainly smooth over some of the teething problems that have been experienced by some installers,” says OpenTherm’s new chairman of its Technical Committee, Huite Jan Hak, who has been responsible for the production of the test tool. “Whilst we accept that there have been some issues, its very easy to blame the OpenTherm protocol for these issues when it transpires that there have been reliability issues with the equipment being installed in some cases we have investigated so far. The arrival of the test tool should address many of these problems and highlight exactly where some of the challenges really lie. For the remainder of the issues we shall reach out to our members to help them improve their OpenTherm implementation where needed.”