PBC Today sat down with Samsung’s head of climate solutions, Steve Fleming, to talk all things energy efficiency
PBC Today sat down with Steve Fleming, head of climate solutions at Samsung, to talk energy efficiency, Samsung’s new and interesting plans for decarbonisation, heat pumps, household heating, and energy control.
How is Samsung preparing for a future where energy efficiency and retrofitting skills will be in high demand?
At Samsung we have extensive internal training programmes, so every person in any part of the business has an awareness of what we’re here for. Every colleague is aware of the product and they’re trained on a product. Our training manager Scott Young produces internal modules that cover everything from a base work level to what a heat pump is – how you wire them, how you control them, the options and alternatives.
Herpreet Panesar, one of our pre-sales engineers, works specifically on our SmartThings side, working directly with clients and the team to show them what SmartThings does. We can do this virtually, or at our training centres and show people in real time how the tech works.
Jaimeet Alang has joined Scott in the training team and we will soon be opening a training centre in Manchester – because it’s not just necessarily about training the people here at Samsung. The more important part is making sure that the workforce is trained too. We’re aiming to get those thousands of engineers out there – who are more familiar with gas boilers – in our centres and to retrain them on heat pumps.
We’ve all had those people come into our house at 8pm on a Wednesday night, when it’s freezing cold, and they get your heating up and running. Those people are the heroes of our homes, I feel.
I have friends and family who work in that industry and we need to work with those engineers to retrain with them, to bring them more closer to this technology. Whether that’s on handling certain aspects of the product, or how it’s controlled, or how the system works.
We need to take responsibility and train more of those engineers, so that when the demands of government legislation drive installation, there’s also the maintenance and aftercare to keep the product operating at the highest level for the longest time.
We also partner with Leah Robson from Your Energy, Your Way, working on bringing more people, particularly women, into the industry. At Samsung Climate Solutions this applies to all parts of the business; marketing, presales, product managers, engineering, installation roles and more.
We will work with the trainee as part of Your Energy Your Way’s traineeship scheme to mentor, upskill and train for today’s product, but also try and give them a bit of insight as to what’s going to happen in the future too.
How are Samsung’s cloud-based solutions helping contractors and installers modernise their methods?
We’ve all had our heating stop working in the winter, often leading to stress purchases in a complete panic. Samsung’s EHS Cloud Service gives an engineer real-time visibility into that product- meaning they can get ahead of many issues.
For me, I would rather have an engineer call and say, “Steve, we see there’s a potential problem here, this needs to be worked on. Can we schedule a service call to your home, which will cost this amount, at a time of your convenience”, rather than me having to phone them and say, “oh my days, my heating’s off, I’ve got no hot water, my kids are cold.”
You can prepare for potential pitfalls or schedule regular maintenance, which reduces the hefty expenses of a panic-bought, quick-fix solution.
Giving households a chance to take back some control over their energy usage
You can pair any Samsung product to your SmartThings app and see in real time how much energy it’s consuming. Then you can look at more sensible tariffs, run your devices at times where it’s a cheaper price per kilowatts. Even being able to turn things off remotely; people leave TVs on, sound bars on, and those costs mount.
It’s those little things that you can do in terms of mitigating your energy costs and keeping on top of it.
The other good news is that the products themselves are always becoming more energy efficient. The HT Quiet, which is a high temperature unit heat pump, operates at a higher temperature, making it a better retrofit product as well.
We’re going to release the R290 heat pump later this year, using the R290 refrigerant which has lower Global Warming Potential – watch this space, more information coming soon – and again, that will be more efficient.
You can have the most energy efficient product in the world – but if you don’t control it, there’s no point making that purchase in the first place.
It’s in the interests of everyone – industry, homeowners and renters – for manufacturers to be involved in a technology race. As Samsung, we’re part of it and I feel we’re at the forefront of it.
But if you and I sit down in a year’s time, well, we could be talking about something completely different, a new product or something else that’s been brought to market by ourselves. That’s the pace and speed and the demand of the industry and the homeowner right now.
