The Electrical Industries Charity is hosting a skydiving experience taking place on Saturday 16 July 2016 at the Go Skydive Centre, Old Sarum Park, Salisbury, Wiltshire. The Go Skydiving event will take your breath away as you freefall from 10,000ft at a speed of 125mph.   Are you feeling brave enough to push yourself to the boundaries? Sign up today and show your family, friends and colleagues how far you can go to raise money for those who need the help and support of our industry charity. The venue will have plenty of entertainment for your spectators too with free entry to the aviation museum and plenty of activities for kids throughout the day. The Go Skydiving event is free, all you have to do is raise a donation of £500, so get your family and friends to help you to fundraise for this great cause and enjoy a fun day this summer. Electrical Industries Charity managing director, Tessa Ogle, said: “We are thrilled to be hosting such an exciting and breath-taking event. The skydive aims to raise money and give people an opportunity to try something new and challenging. We are looking forward to meeting those who are ready to face their fears at this fantastic summer event.” For further details on the Go Skydiving event, visit www.electricalcharity.org The Confidential Helpline number is: 0800 652 1618. Source link

Infrared heat has been around for a long time in the shape of muscle relaxing heat treatment lamps, but Mirrorstone Infrared Heating – a Leicester company, has developed the technology into an innovative range of energy-efficient Infrared Panel Heaters that look set to change the way that UK homes and businesses are heated. Mirrorstone’s IR panel heaters are available in a wide range of sizes, from the most diminutive at 600 x 600mm, to the largest and most powerful 1000 x 1200mm/1200W model that’s capable of heating a large space measuring 60m3 (metres cubed). Due to the fact that they’re so simply constructed and contain no moving parts, IR panels very rarely malfunction and require no maintenance throughout their 25 – 30-year lifespan. They can be mounted easily on a wall or a ceiling by one person with a drill, a spirit level and an hour to spare. This makes them a very quick and convenient way to heat a room – a viable alternative to the long, arduous and expensive task of wiring up or plumbing in an entire central heating system. As such, this emerging form of heating is now being adopted, not only by householders, but also by large construction companies, anxious to make their new-build homes as energy-efficient and space-saving as possible for the new breed of increasingly savvy consumer. Indeed, at just 22mm thick, an IR panel heater will enable users to reclaim a considerable amount of space in their room, especially given that their predecessors were invariably cumbersome, wall-mounted electric storage heaters. How Infrared Heating Works As with any totally new form of technology, infrared heating has its detractors who claim it’s unsafe or that it’s not energy-efficient. However, the Far Infrared Waves emitted by IR panels are very similar to those emitted by the sun but without any of the harmful components like Ultraviolet (UV). This makes infrared a particularly safe and natural form of heat, a fact that many health and yoga studios worldwide are using to benefit their patrons. Indeed, like sunlight, IR heats the objects in a room and not the air – exciting their molecules and causing them to vibrate and produce their own heat. This actually stimulates circulation and aids muscle repair, while the panel’s consistent infrared heat eradicates the damp stuffiness a convection heater would otherwise have caused. Moisture-free and with a consistent temperature, the air in an IR-heated room will be a healthy alternative to the fluctuations and cold pockets created by convection and one in which mould and mildew will have no opportunity to thrive – good news indeed for those who suffer with respiratory issues! Perhaps surprisingly, a room’s objects have a lot less molecular mass than its air, making it possible for the infrared panel to be switched off automatically when the temperature reaches a certain level. This means it will consume fewer units of electricity than a convection heater, thereby saving the user a considerable amount of money on their heating bills. This short video gives a brief overview of the way IR panels work:   Types of IR Panel Available IR panels aren’t just more convenient and practical than convection heaters, they’re also a great deal more aesthetically pleasing. White IR panels can be secreted in a suspended ceiling where, disguised as regular tiles, they’re virtually undetectable, whereas eye-catching images can be printed directly onto the surface of custom panels, transforming them into attractive, dual-purpose pictures. Sleek, minimalistic glass panel heaters are now being used in modern office complexes and, for bathrooms, mirrored panels are ideal because they never mist up, no matter how steamy the atmosphere becomes. To find out more about infrared heating, call Mirrorstone Infrared Heating on 0116 436 2250 and visit the website at: www.mirrorstoneheating.co.uk You can also check out the latest news from the world of IR heating on the Mirrorstone Facebook and Twitter social media pages.

Chief executive is trying to persuade investors that utility spin-off has a good story to tell ©Uniper Klaus Schäfer’s abiding memory of a year studying in Oxford in the early 1990s is jumping off Magdalen Bridge into the Cherwell river on Guy Fawke’s night. “It was a bit chilly,” he says, with classic German understatement. More On this topic IN Utilities Next month he takes the plunge again, as the company he runs, Uniper, makes its debut on the German stock exchange. The reception might be just as icy. Some have predicted that its share price could slump on the opening, a prospect Mr Schäfer says doesn’t faze him. “You can’t evaluate Uniper’s stock market success based on a single day,” says the Uniper chief executive at the company’s Düsseldorf headquarters. “With a spin-off, you typically look back after a year.” Uniper’s demerger from its parent company, the utility Eon, is the most dramatic corporate response so far to Germany’s Energiewende, its radical policy shift towards renewable power. The change has been disastrous for Eon. The electricity it generates from coal and gas has been squeezed out of the market by subsidised wind and solar, while all that cheap green power has pushed down wholesale energy prices, from €60 per megawatt-hour in April 2011 to about €27 now. Eon’s market capitalisation has collapsed from its most recent peak of €105.7bn in January 2008 to €18bn. The company has responded by splitting itself in two. It is holding on to renewables and energy distribution and hiving its fossil fuel power plants and energy trading unit into Uniper. Eon shareholders will receive one share in Uniper for every ten Eon shares they hold. Many welcome the split. “Theoretically the sum of the parts of Eon and Uniper should be greater than the current Eon, because the spin-off will create more transparency and optionality,” says Thomas Deser, portfolio manager at Union Investment. But perhaps inevitably, Uniper has been dismissed by some as the energy equivalent of a “bad bank”. In roadshows across the world over the past six months, Mr Schäfer, who was previously Eon’s finance chief, has sought to dispel that impression. Uniper’s fleet is, he says, a lot more diverse, both by country and technology, than people think: its hydropower stations in Germany and Sweden are, he says, some of the “crown jewels of the energy market”. It also has a “very strong physical commodities business”, which contributed a quarter of earnings last year and includes interests in gas pipelines, gas storage facilities and a huge gasfield in Siberia. Uniper also owns Russia’s third largest private power generation company. But the response from potential investors has been mixed, according to people present at the roadshows. Some, worried about sanctions, are reluctant to have any exposure to Russia. Others got their fingers burnt with Eon and are not keen to dive into another German utility. The caution is understandable. Uniper’s pro-forma financial statements show net losses in all of the past three years. The company’s value on Eon’s books was €15.5bn at the start of the year: now it’s just under €12bn. Some analysts think it is not worth much more than €5bn. Mr Schäfer says it makes more sense to look at Uniper’s operational performance than its net income, which has been affected by repeated writedowns of its power generation assets. There, the picture is not so bleak: its adjusted earnings for the first half of this year were €1.5bn, up 50 per cent on the previous year. Other factors have combined to improve the outlook. Power prices have been ticking up, for example. Sweden is abolishing a nuclear tax that weighed on Uniper’s reactors. The UK is moving ahead with plans for capacity payments, which reward companies like Uniper for providing back-up power to intermittent renewables. Other countries are also making positive noises about capacity markets, though the German government is against them: the economics minister has called them “welfare benefits for power stations”. Berlin’s position could soften, however. “The closure of Germany’s nuclear power stations in 2022 means a tightening of the German power market which will lead . . . to an increased likelihood of capacity payments,” says Peter Crampton, analyst at Macquarie. Uniper has, meanwhile, come up with a plan to reduce debt and improve its credit rating, currently one notch above junk. It will cut costs and gradually reduce capital spending, and sell €2bn of assets: Uniper will be “run for cash”, Mr Schäfer says, and will this year pay a dividend of €200m, implying €0.55 a share. Nevertheless, the first day of trading could be hairy. Since Uniper will not be part of Germany’s Dax index, some tracker funds that own Eon stock will automatically have to rotate out of Uniper shares. Others, sceptical of Uniper’s prospects, might also sell. “The attractiveness or not of Uniper depends on where you expect commodity and power prices to go,” says Mr Deser. “My impression is that the power price, at least, is going to remain under pressure for a good while to come.” Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016. You may share using our article tools. Please don’t cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web. Source link

Foundations contractors on both sides of the Atlantic have joined forces to produce new best practice guidance on using the tremie method of piping concrete. Above: The guide is free to download at www.effc.org The document* gives guidance on the characteristic performance of fresh concrete and its method of placement using tremie methods in bored piles and diaphragm walls. It says that getting the mix right can only be achieved in a joint approach by the specialist contractor (to achieve the execution requirements), the designer (to meet the durability and structural needs), and the supplier (to produce an economic and practical mix). Recent trends have favoured higher strength classes and lower water/cement ratios, resulting in greater dependence on admixtures to compensate for reduced workability and to meet the competing demands for workability in the fresh state and setting time. The application of testing methods which reflect the rheological properties of the concrete has not developed at the same rate as the mixes themselves and it is still not uncommon for the slump or flow table test to be used as the only acceptance test for the fresh concrete. A review of problems in bored piles and diaphragm walls cast using tremie methods by both the European Federation of Foundation Contractors (EFFC) and the Deep Foundations Institute (DFI) in the United States identified a common issue that many of the problems were caused, at least partially, by the use of unsuitable concrete mixes. Inadequate concrete specifications and insufficient testing procedures were identified as a primary cause. The consequences of these problems are often significant and it has been recognised that spending more on getting the concrete right is the most cost effective approach. A joint concrete task group was set up by EFFC and DFI in 2014 to look at this issue and its best practice guide is now available. This first edition of the guide proposes appropriate performance criteria for the concrete together with test methods and initial recommendations on acceptance values. A second edition of the guide will be published on completion of further research and development work as this will allow definitive acceptance criteria to be presented. The guide also addresses design considerations including concrete rheology, mix design, reinforcement detailing and concrete cover as well as best practice rules for placement. A review of methods to test the as-built elements is presented together with advice on the identification and interpretation of results.   * The EFFC/DFI Best Practice Guide to Tremie Concrete for Deep Foundations (1st Edition) is available for free download at www.effc.org             This article was published on 18 Feb 2016 (last updated on 18 Feb 2016). Source link