The engineer’s role

Many people really struggle with planning and with anything technical. The role of the engineer is to keep the group safe, practical, reasoned, and focused, so that they stay on track to make and document a viable plan.

It’s also useful if engineers can take on a little of the “social” management, for instance, keeping an eye on the time during the parts of the session they are not leading, writing down anything the group needs to all be able to see, and so on.

Many of the engineers will be operating well away from their core engineering discipline - and we applaud that. You do not need to know about energy use in buildings already. The programme’s technical content is fairly simple and you can ask us if anything doesn’t make sense to you.

Because you are not operating in a professional capacity, there is no contractual relationship constraining what you do and say. Of course you will want to use your skills to help the community, but you are offering your talents just as all other community volunteers do - as one human to others. It’s perfectly OK to say you don’t know the answer to a question!

Professional Indemnity

Even if you are a building services engineer, you are not providing a professional service as part of the programme. Neither is HeatHack. We will stress throughout the programme that this is an exercise that should point them in the right direction, but they need to check the details with the appropriate professionals before commissioning any work.

Please keep in mind that the programme is not designed to deliver detailed and definitive plans. We’re trying to equip groups with the knowledge, language, and confidence to have the right conversations with the professionals so that they will get the right advice. Often groups go to energy efficiency consultants, heating consultants, and architects with a brief that isn’t right for the circumstances. Other groups go straight to installers to ask them what to do, and then get solutions that are designed for other kinds of buildings and situations. Installers can make changes to the aspect of the building they specialise in, but they don’t have the skills required to choose the right changes to make and think about how they interact with everything else.

Extra investigations

Some engineers want to go deeper into the issues for their group, and we support that wherever we can - either directly or passing you to people who know more than we do. We are adding materials to this guide as fast as we can manage in response to the things engineers ask and tell us. Meanwhile, the best approach is to talk to us.

During the sessions, it may be that you discover issues in the building where it would be helpful to run further investigations - for instance, issues with heat distribution that require thinking about pumpwork or the pipework sizing and configuration in a more complicated boiler room, or checking whether a wall is insulated. It’s useful to identify and document concerns, but this is where your responsibility stops. If you wish to explore further, we are happy to try to facilitate that, but please be mindful of your time so that you don’t feel overburdened.

One of our core goals in this programme is to demonstrate how useful it is for the groups to include engineers in their community work. Communities have talented people all around them, but because people have to move around the country to chase work opportunities, it is harder for groups to connect with them than it once was. Engineers bring a perspective to managing community buildings that is often missing. Thank you for being involved.