This boiler raises the steam for the ironer and the washroom. Every machine in the hall was measured in the same survey.
A finishing line loses heat in three places: the boiler house that raises the steam, the ironer roof, and the tumblers. Surveyed together on one site, they rank in an order most people guess wrong.
The boiler house is 49.75 kW across 28 bare components — more than the ironer and two dryers combined. It is also the least visible: it sits in a room nobody walks through, behind a door that stays shut, while the machines that get the attention are the ones out on the floor.
That is the sequencing argument. If a site can only do one thing this year, the boiler house returns more than anything on the finishing line — and it does so without a single machine coming off production.
Every figure here comes from one survey of one plant: the same boiler, ironer and dryers, measured on the same visit with the same instrument and the same ISO 12241 model. Cross-machine comparisons are only worth making when the method is identical.
| Where | Bare | Insulated | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boiler house 28 components | 49.75 kW | 2.58 kW | 58 % |
| Flatwork ironer roof | 16.33 kW | 0.86 kW | 19 % |
| Tumbler dryers ×2 | 19.54 kW | 0.92 kW | 23 % |
| Line total | 85.6 kW | 4.4 kW | 100 % |
Dryer count is illustrative — two machines shown so the three blocks are comparable. Set your own count on the dryer page; every extra tumbler adds 9.77 kW to the bare column.
One consequence worth stating plainly: at this ratio the boiler house is more than half the site's bare loss, and it is usually the last thing surveyed, because it is not where the product is.
| Boiler house, at 5,840 h/yr | Value |
|---|---|
| Heat not lost | 275 MWh |
| Gas avoided at 88 % boiler efficiency | 313 MWh |
| CO₂ avoided | 58 t |
| Every surface, insulated | ≤45 °C |
Every one of these surfaces is opened on a schedule. What changes with the panel is not whether it opens — it is what opening costs.
| Conventional cladding, per access | |
|---|---|
| Unscrew or cut the sheet panels | |
| Dig out the wool — settled and degraded by heat and vibration | |
| Rebuild the wool, cut and fasten new sheet | |
| Cycle per access | 10+ min* |
| Inzonex cycle, per access | |
|---|---|
| Release the snap buttons by hand — no tools | |
| Lift the section clear | |
| Snap the same section back | |
| Cycle per access | ~1.5 min* |
*Access-cycle assumptions, not timed trial results — treat them as inputs to check against your own crew, not as measured performance. Cut sheet and compacted wool are scrapped, so conventional access also carries a material cost every time. The panel is designed to come off and go back on; nothing is consumed.
A sheet-metal casing has to span every surface these panels span. Same job, same surfaces — the difference is what a technician lifts.
| Outer layer, whole set | Weight | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Steel sheet 0.6 mm lightest gauge used | 146 kg | 7850 kg/m³ + Z275 zinc |
| Steel sheet 0.8 mm common on plant — basis | 195 kg | same, 0.8 mm |
| Steel sheet 1.0 mm walked-on / wind-loaded runs | 244 kg | same, 1.0 mm |
| Inzonex outer fabric | 16.4 kg | our spec |
About 12× lighter on the 0.8 mm basis. The mineral-wool core is identical in both systems — it is the outer layer, and only the outer layer, that the design can change. That is what a technician lifts, at height, next to a live boiler.
The 47.2 kW this boiler house throws away does not leave the building either. It heats a plant room that already runs warm, next door to a hall fighting heat and humidity from the ironer and the tumblers. Nobody meters either of them.
The difference between the two rooms is who stands in them. The finishing hall has people in it all shift; the boiler house has someone in it for minutes at a time. That is exactly why the boiler house gets ignored — the discomfort has no constituency, so the heat stays.
| Room | Bare load | Who is in it |
|---|---|---|
| Boiler house | 47.2 kW | an engineer, minutes at a time |
| Finishing hall | 34.7 kW | the line, all shift |
ISO 13732-1 sets the contact-burn thresholds. In this boiler house the top steam set runs at 180 °C and the ground-floor feed set at 100 °C — the first burns instantly, the second in about a second. Insulated to ≤45 °C both can be held indefinitely, which matters most on the valves an operator actually reaches for.
Plant-room temperature depends on ventilation and building fabric and is not modelled here. On a comparable boiler room the same team measured about 6 °C cooler after the bare components were panelled. That measurement →
Same boiler, same angle, five weeks apart — the plant this whole laundry set was surveyed on.
The insulation went on while the laundry kept running. Nothing on the finishing line stopped for it — the other half of why the boiler house is the sensible place to start.
5,840 h/yr is the duty this laundry runs the boiler at. The equipment page for the same machine defaults to 4,290 h — same boiler, same kilowatts, different running hours, which is the whole of the difference between the two money figures.
The part a heat-loss calculator normally leaves out. Count every time a panel has to come off — inspection, valve work, cleaning — not the number of boiler shutdowns. Cycle times are project assumptions; overwrite them with your own.
Carbon price left at zero unless your site is inside a trading scheme or has an internal price. UK ETS and EU ETS both apply to installations above the combustion threshold — carbon hub →
CAD reconstruction and thermal modelling by the Inzonex engineering team. The 3D models behind these comparisons are built by hand from field-surveyed equipment, not from manufacturer artwork.