CIBSE President's Blog

Why wasn’t your President in Davos as an Award Winning Global Thought Leader you must be asking yourself?   I was of course, instead in Dallas, at the ASHRAE Winter Conference . Where else? If Davos was as smart as it claims it would form a Swiss ASHRAE Chapter and cut the clash. I returned packed with new wisdom and quips, care of the opening session’s dynamic guest speaker Superbowler Rocky Bleier . Let’s start with: ‘The Steelers’ were a tough team from a tough city. You played them and you got beat real bad. The only problem was that they didn’t ever win. They never had a plan’ Isn’t the trip from the airport to an unfamiliar city something that frames your view for days? Empty dual carriageways and regimented palms and you would be heading towards a despot’s palace. Mass illegal housing and you are heading towards to ‘rapidly developing country’.   Uxbridge from the Piccadilly line versus the Shanghai Maglev (when it is working) – say no more.   For Dall...

The next blog will be from the ASHRAE DALLAS WINTER CONFERENCE , so get ready for 2GB of insights – meanwhile MY New Year’s Resolutions: 1.        Not to be A Grumpy President (N.B. lapses inMay ) 2.        Never to suggest that the C in DCLG stands for Conservatories 3.        Never to use Lower Heating Value when talking to architects with an iPad loaded with Biomass Boiler pdf’s 4.        Keep Black Tie Dinner Drinking to within 1 unit a day ( mental note: check whether a unit is just a bottle or could be a magnum once in a while) 5.        Remind the Mayor (e.g. next time we sit next to each other at the barbers) that London is supposed to be the capital city of something not just a global theme park…

Well, a Merry Christmas to you all. The President is already several Xmas lunches for the better, including the Past Presidents’ Lunch. Apparently it is not until you are a ‘Past’ that the Secret of Eternal Youth is passed on to you.   For this guy the secret couldn’t come sooner! The Big Xmas Present this month was the Energy Bill. It was just the thing to use to bury good news. Published the same day were the public versions of the reports that Alistair Buchannan used for his scary Annual Lecture on UK energy security . But also published were some real sweeties in consultations from the Energy Efficiency Deployment Office on electricity consumption reduction.   Grief Reduction – the ‘R’ word! Check it out, read out Technical Resources on the CIBSE website , write in! Plug Guide F for all it is worth! There could be £3000/kW on offer in the capacity mechanism if I have my sums right! The Father Xmas Problem It was never clear to me as a child why Fathe...

A building services engineer takes over the most powerful country in the world? Your President bottles out in the shadow of the UK political class. And the Energy Bill arrives just as DECs risk to all intents and purposes leaving. Thanks to the Counter Terrorism Acts this blog will not mention Guy Fawkes… We Paramount Leaders My Chinese student was conspicuously triumphalist this month. His country had changed presidents (OK Paramount Leader) and. it hadn’t cost $4billion. Indeed he noted they had actually changed the President. So a special congratulations from one President to another: to Xi Jinping in taking charge of the People’s Republic of China. I used to joke that there were more qualified engineers on the PRC Politiburo than CEng’s in DTI. The Politburo engineering count is now down to 3, but retirements taken into account, that probably still beats the Department of Business Innovation and Skills. Xi was trained as a chemical engineer, which, of course, is just...

October is the month for everything… October is a big month in the Presidential Calendar: joining ASHRAE and IMechE for Graduate of the Year Competition , opening the CIBSE Conference at Olympia, hosting the President’s Awards Dinner, dropping in on the Worshipful Company of Fan makers (as you do) and attending the Construction Industry Council . Meanwhile both my first and second year Masters students arrived on campus to systems engineer. Prestidigitation became Presidigitation. Thank heavens for Construction Advisers The CIBSE Conference opened alongside the Building Services exhibition on a bright autumn morning at Olympia. After a quick ‘ let’s keep it simple’ from yours truly, Paul Morrell, the outgoing Government Construction Adviser gave us his wise 40Mb PowerPoint take on the industry. CIBSE gave him an Armada Cup at my Awards Dinner a little later in the week at the Royal Society. In years of turmoil when Parliament often seemed little more than a rehearsal for th...

Of the historic events fighting to get into this month’s Presidential Blog - CIBSE September Board, Ofgem Board, Start of Term - all pale into insignificance against the Amazing: the launch of iPhone5 . Otherwise it’s back to work in North Korea and a tolerant CIBSE Board suffers a grumpy President. iPhone5 first. Its only snag (aside from the new connector and Maps App placing my house in the next street!) is that you still can’t remove the cement that was once on your fingers and now on the retina screen. Yet again iPhone isn’t the contractor’s phone of choice. What a massive global market to miss! I’ve still got an old Nokia with a sealed rubber keyboard ( YEN members may need to look ‘keyboard’ up on your iPad) that you could throw into a bucket of plaster with impunity. In that big fat CIRIA book ‘Barriers to Innovation in the Construction Industry’ the thinnest chapter must be ‘Barriers to Using the Mobile Phone’. Before it was invented, how did we ever give clients the...