Counters for heat and water making progress in Romania

More and more Romanians, unhappy with the high prices of thermal power and hot water, choose to install counters for heat and hot water. Bucharest-based Fast Eco, a plant manufacturing scientific and ecological equipment, is the only company in Romania producing ultrasound counters for metering the consumption of thermal power and hot water.

The general manager of Fast Eco, Valentin Sorin Simota, a Radauti-born person, is 39 years old and has been working with this plant for 20 years. While he was a student, he went there and got employed as a common worker, passed all the stages and positions – head of team, head of workshop, head of department and finally technical manager.

Fast Eco dates back in 1978, when IAUC (Enterprise for Research Equipment and Apparatuses) was established. Until 1990, this was the only company in Romania having produced equipment for activities in research, universities and their laboratories. The company in 1994 was entirely privatised and its current core business is manufacturing thermal power counters.

Fast Eco is currently employing 125 people and registered some 30 billion lei in turnover and more than 3.2 billion lei in gross profit last year.

Depending on the construction principle, there are three types of counters for metering the consumption of thermal power in the world: mechanical, electromagnetic and ultrasound devices. There are no producers of electromagnetic counters in Romania, while there are very few producing mechanic counters.

“Fast Eco has been producing ultrasound counters since 1998. Till 1989, it was the only producer of ultrasound control devices for pipes, bars and steel sheets in various sizes and widths and it has been producing width measuring devices and medical equipment based on the ultrasound principle,” Simota specifies.

An ultrasound counter costs between DM 600 and DM 2,000, depending on the size, while the value of installation works amounts to 30-40% of the counter’s price, Simota specifies.

Ultrasound counters are the most expensive, but at the same time they provide the highest quality on the market. Due to the fact that such counters are static, namely they do not have any moving parts, the wear and tear is nearly 0.

The counter is re-calibrated once in 5-6 years, while the measurement precision is very high. In addition, ultrasound counters do not block the flowing passage, leading to small pressure fluctuations. As they are impurity-proof, they do not need filters.

The general manager of Fast Eco says that having such a counter installed lessens the leakage of thermal power in the network and allows for 40% cut in the populations expenses, as only the actual consumption is paid.

“The modern solution of decentralising the management of thermal power delivered to the urban consumers is to use modular thermal units supplying smaller groups of consumers or even single ones with power,” Valentin Simota says. The company’s customers are the regies distributing thermal power and water.