Nearly £40 million a year is wasted by the specialist engineering sector on the cost of prequalification schemes, according to an extensive survey by the Specialist Engineering Contractors’ (SEC) Group. This is the cost of firms being required to join multiple prequalification schemes in order to be eligible to bid for work. Larger firms may have to belong to as many as 20 schemes, mainly run by commercial operators. SEC Group comments that there is no evidence of any added value to clients of all this activity.

The 2010 CIBSE conference takes place at the British Museum in London on 27 and 28 April. Its theme is ‘Resilience and building services; how to secure the future’. Its aim is to equip building-services specialists with an insight into scenario planning for commercial resilience. It will provide information on the political, legal, environmental and technical changes that will have significant impacts in the next two to five years. There will be sessions on ensuring that designs are resilient and that legal, contractual and other risks have been adequately managed.

Bleed-off water from cooling towers serving the Ropemaker building in London is being used to provide grey water for flushing toilets for this 54 500 m2 building. The direct use of bleed-off water for this purpose is made possible by the use of ozone treatment for the cooling towers, rather than chemicals and biocides.

Highly energy-efficient and responsive management of lighting in the new 10-storey building at 107 Cheapside in London is provided by lighting controls and sensors supplied by Delmatic. It is a multi-tenanted commercial and retail building. The Delmatic systems were specified by consulting engineers Roger Preston & Partners and installed by Lorne Stewart.

One of the UK’s largest operators of holiday parks has reduced energy bills for its swimming pools by £77 000 a year, with a payback of just over a year, by fitting ABB drives to pumps. Bourne Leisure owns brands such as Haven, Butlins and Warner Hotels and has swimming pools at a number of sites.

Two leading retail chains are enjoying the financial benefits of replacing R22 air-conditioning systems with more efficient inverter-driven systems from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Europe (MHIE) and supplied through 3D Air Sales. The work was carried out as part of a refit of selected Oasis fashion stores and Vision Express opticians. The new systems use R410A.

The world's gone mad for renewables. And not so many years ago, it went nuts about condensing boilers. But what about combining the two? Ian Bradley looks at their integration.

It is now more important than ever to fine-tune every aspect of building-services performance. Tony Willis explains why boiler dry cycling is often overlooked — and why most control strategies fail to address this area of waste

Display Energy Certificates are not providing evidence of real energy-efficiency improvements in public buildings, according to a data-analysis project carried out by BRE Trust. The project interrogated the DEC statistics of over 28 000 public-sector buildings. These certificates are a record of a building’s metered energy usage and associated carbon emissions over a 12-month period and compare them against established benchmarks to give a rating from A (best) to G (poorest).

When a plumber from south London downs tools for the day he sets off to the gym to train three young boxing hopefuls for the London Olympics in 2012. Samm Mullins works for Pimlico Plumbers and is a former boxer. He retired from competition 10 years ago due to injury and has since become qualified to coach at advanced level.

Studying for a Level One NVQ in engineering at Solihull College through CTC Kingshurst’s Academy’s link project has led to 16-year-old Rob Gardiner securing a 4-year apprenticeship with NG Bailey. He has been studying at the college’s Woodlands Campus since he was 14. The link project gives pupils in years 10 and 11 the opportunity to study a vocational subject at college alongside the core subjects they study at school.

Sources of renewable energy that can be used in buildings to reduce carbon emissions and comply with planning-permissions requirements for onsite renewable energy are limited. What’s more, they tend to have rather high capital costs and can pose other planning-permission issues — especially wind turbines.