Note from 27 Feb 2026 meeting between Bring Energy and Chobham Manor Residents

This is a set of notes from the meeting between the CMRA and Bring Energy/ELE.  Present were eight Chobham Residents, 3 members of LLDC and two Councillors.

The meeting was at our request and was called to follow-up on the major outage from January in Plant Room 1, at Nolan Mansions which serves “Phase 1 and Phase 4  properties”.

Some of what we will cover here will be a forward look to include actions the Bring Energy are taking to improve; while these new works are needed they were not in place during the January outage.  The general tenet of the meeting as a desire to improve the quality of maintenance, monitoring and customer service.

The Network

Bring Energy think about the network in two parts:

• Primary: The network from power stations to plant rooms.  This is served by the two generation stations at either side of the QEOP.  The power stations provide redundancy, Bring Energy can switch power around the network in the event of power station failure.  This network has real time monitoring which feeds to an operations centre, manned 24/7; this capability has been in place for some time.

• Secondary:  This is the network from plant rooms to the HIU in properties.  There are three plant rooms on our estate, Nolan Mansions (Madison Way), Hyett Court (Derny Avenue) and Tull House.  Nolan Mansions Plant Room has one “plate”, I think this is the super-duper heat exchanger, the other two have two plates each.  Plant rooms can be monitored but require dial-in.  This means that the operations room has no push notification of the operation of plant rooms.  

The metering system allows Bring Energy to know the temperature of the supply to individual properties.  They use this to calculate the heat loss that we pay for on our bills.  Metering is managed by a third party.  Data regarding temperature at the individual property HIU is not available to them today in a manner which is useful (i.e. it takes too long to get it).

We were informed of the following actions/improvements that Bring Energy is putting in place:

• They are looking into a second plate for the Nolan Mansions Plant Room.  This was not a firm promise and we did not discuss whether this leaves a single point of failure.

• They have placed a work order to improve the telemetry at the plant room so that real time data is fed back to the operations centre.  This work is expected to be completed in approx 6 weeks.

• Real time access to HIU arrival temperatures is being requested from the metering company to enable Bring Energy to track issues to the end property.  No timescale was discussed.

Maintenance is planned and followed on the primary and secondary networks and comprise 3, 6 and 12 monthly cycles.  We did not investigate the composition of maintenance plans.

There is a “Chobham Myth” that the network does not have the capacity to support the estate in extreme cold weather; this was rejected and the secondary network has never exceeded 80% capacity.  Bring Energy is adamant that capacity is not a problem.

The January Outage

The January outage originated with the failure of the BioMass boiler (@ Kings Yard), as they attempted to recover this triggered failures elsewhere which cascaded at multiple points.  It took several days until they triggered the major recovery plan; a failure that they have recognised.  The biggest impact was of course the Nolan Mansions Plant Room but others were affected too.  They do not know the reason for the failure of the BioMass boiler.  

We have temporary boilers at each of our plant rooms.  Nolan Mansions is active and the other two temporary boilers are connected, on stand by.  The plan is to switch over the active boiler to the permanent plant in Nolan Mansions on 3rd March.  Communication has been sent out via L&Q and Whatsapp.  The boilers will be left on site and on standby by for another two weeks

The lessons:

• Invoke business continuity/major incident plans sooner.

• Bring energy will conduct a simulation on the BioMass boiler when demand for heat is lower to identify the root cause of its failure.

• Engineers focusing on the plant room and not considering the heat availability at property HIUs.  Processes have been changed.  

Help Desk

Bring Energy has a small help desk/call centre service in house; this operates during working hours and 8am to 1pm on Saturdays.  All other times they use a third party operation with 300 seats available.

If there is an outage during working hours the in house call centre will become overwhelmed - hence long wait times.  

Out of hours (OOH) call centre has more capacity but the operation proved to be most unsatisfactory.  There was no collective knowledge of a fault and agents were completely uninformed of the status of repairs/investigations.

Bring Energy has no means to reach out to individual customers through text, email or other means.

The OOH call centre should ask callers about vulnerability and a 12 hour response to provide alternative heat is expected; this should be triggered at the 9 hour point.

Improvements:

• A form has been issued to the OOH call centre which triggers an alert to Bring Energy management staff when 5 properties have reported an outage.  This is an interim measure.

• A system of text/email to enable direct and proactive communications to residents will be implemented in 8-12 weeks.  This should then reduce call centre volume and improve the information provided to residents.

• Chat bot (we did not discuss what form this would take) to be implemented in around 6 months.

We have asked Bring Energy  to stop using sole references to build phases (ie Phase 1 and Phase 4) as new residents are not familiar with their build phase.

Opinion: There are still holes in the OOH system but Bring Energy has committed to continued improvement.

Accounts

We asked why their accounts were late; it is because of problems with the takeover of Equants.  We were assured that there were no financial issues.

Pricing

Although not an agenda item we discussed pricing.  

• Heat loss charges are for the losses on the secondary network, and should be the same for all properties “tethered” to each plan room - i.e. three groups.

• Standing changes differ by phase as Taylor Wimpey designed different capacities.

• We should expect variable costs to drop as gas prices are lower.

• We discussed higher variable costs to allow lower standing charges.  Don't  know how this landed.  

Further Meetings

We agreed to hold meetings every quarter so that we can track progress.