Sussex based, Vent-Axia, a leader in low-carbon ventilation, is celebrating winning the Building Services Product Innovation of the Year in this year’s prestigious Retro Expo Awards. Scooping the award for its revolutionary Lo-Carbon Tempra the company received the accolade at an awards ceremony held at the Business Design Centre, London on 5th December following the UK’s only retrofit exhibition and conference - Retro Expo and the Retrofit Summit.
The Retro Expo Awards recognises excellence in retrofit products, projects and people across the domestic, commercial and public sector markets. All categories are assessed by a panel of experts in their field which is jointly chaired by Dr Peter Rickaby (RIBA and Rickaby Thompson Associates) and Professor Paul Ruyssevelt (University College London, Technology Strategy Board).
With the Building Services Product Innovation of the Year category the judges were looking for a development that has demonstrated a significant technological advance or brought about a step change in retrofit delivery. After a rigorous judging process, Vent-Axia won this category for its pioneering Lo-Carbon Tempra single room heat room heat recovery unit which offers the benefits of both continuous ventilation and heat recovery.
Designed specifically to offer affordable easy to install heat recovery to the residential refurbishment market, the Lo-Carbon Tempra was the UK’s first single room heat recovery unit that can be retrofitted through a 100mm diameter hole in the wall. This allows inefficient extract fans to be easily replaced with a discreet, low energy, continuously running alternative that offers up to 84% heat recovery.
Lee Nurse, Marketing Director at Vent-Axia, commented: “We are very proud to have been acknowledged for our pioneering Lo-Carbon Tempra. Britain has the oldest housing stock in the developed World with 8.5 million properties over 60 years old therefore offering significant opportunities to improve indoor air quality and building performance while cutting carbon emissions. Single room heat recovery makes heat recovery more accessible and affordable for existing homes and so offers huge potential carbon reductions for both private and social housing.”
Allowing simple installation through a 100mm diameter hole in a wall, the innovative design of the unit enables standard bathroom, kitchen, toilet or utility room fans to be easily changed for a Tempra without the need to make the hole any larger, saving substantially on installation time and cost. Now available with two different spigot sizes the Tempra can be fitted through wall depths of up to 320mm, or up to 460mm.
Central to the Tempra’s compact footprint required to fit in a 100mm diameter hole is its double wheel motorised impellers. The innovative technology allows for just one motor to be used with an extended shaft to drive two impellers to achieve double flow requirements, resulting in a very energy efficient solution. The unit’s performance, taken together with Tempra’s integral Lo-Carbon™ DC motor, brings significant energy savings and will help reduce a home’s carbon footprint.
Discreet and quiet in operation, Tempra can be set to run continuously at 6 l/s or 9 l/s, boosting up to 13 l/s if required. For intermittent extract applications, the unit can be set to operate at 15 l/s. It also incorporates a manual summer setting to ensure that when it is warm outside, it operates on extract only. This eliminates the risk of the home overheating in hot summer weather.
The Tempra is part of Vent-Axia’s Lo-Carbon™ collection. The aim of the Lo-Carbon initiative is to offer the latest low carbon ventilation technology in order to reduce building energy consumption and so carbon emissions. For further information on all products and services offered by Vent-Axia telephone 0844 856 0590.