Conservation heating what is it and how can it help conservation
Conservation heating is a special method used primarily in historic buildings, museums, galleries and archives to protect sensitive architecture, artifacts and artworks. Instead of heating a space for human comfort, it uses heaters controlled by a humidistat to maintain a stable, safe level of relative humidity. In the latest range of controllers from Carlton Thermal Systems Ltd special strategies have been incorporated following consultation with Oxford Conservation consortium and The National Trust.
As detailed above the main goal is to increase the air’s capacity to hold moisture by increasing the temperature, however some other requirements need to be taken into account and we have added these to our Conservation+ controller, these are
- A comfort mode, when this is selected the controller runs to maintain a comfort temperature for a timed period, useful in rooms for study or work
- Frost protection, this mode is used to override the system if there is a potential for the area to freeze
- Over temperature limit, this is a high temperature limit that overrides the system once the room temperature gets too high
- Hours run meter, this calculates the amount of time a heater is on to enable the user to calculate kW/hours energy usage
Our solution the PRO0524 Conservation+ controller is designed with a touch screen display that can be on all the time showing the relative humidity and temperature, or can be set to go into display sleep mode as not to distract from the artefacts its helping to protects, it has over temperature and low RH interventions as well as comfort heating by timer and hours run meter to calculate energy used, it will control either one 2kW electrical heater directly or two using the PRO0524/S extension module and can also send a signal to a building management system or take the place of a room thermostat.
