Monodraught Ltd., who have achieved tremendous success with their Windcatcher ventilation system and the SunPipe system, is changing hands and will be incorporated in the Danish company of VKR Holding, which owns brands such as VELUX roof windows and VELFAC and Rationel vertical windows as well as Window Master automatic window openers and thermal solar companies.

Monodraught established in 1974 under the management of Prof. Terry Payne, has now developed into an innovative and successful supplier of solar driven natural ventilation products to complement its renowned Windcatcher Ventilation systems. Terry Payne will continue as Managing Director of Monodraught Ltd with the same Management Team and their aim is to continue the strong growth trajectory in the future years.

“Over 30 years we have built Monodraught up to be the leader in the UK market for Natural Ventilation, and demonstrated that our Windcatcher Natural Ventilation systems offer an ideal alternative to traditional air conditioning and mechanical ventilation,” states Terry Payne. He added “our close dialogue with Architects and Consultants has meant that our products cater for the natural ventilation requirements of almost all types of property. With the incorporation into VKR Holding, Monodraught will be in a position to offer an even broader and more comprehensive product range of natural ventilation products not least through our association with WindowMaster, but also with the entire VKR Group. At the same time, we will gain access to resources that will ensure the sustained development of the company’s activities particularly in our new solar driven products division, and ultimately this will lead to capacity for great international expansion.”

Leif Jensen, the CEO of VKR Holding commented “We believe that Natural Ventilation will be increasingly important in future building design. Systems based on intelligent control of natural ventilation channels such as windows and ventilation turrets, and have evolved into a strong alternative to traditional air conditioning and mechanical ventilation.

Dr Sean Zhang Joins Monodraught

Monodraught originally sponsored Dr Zhang at Napier University from 1999 to 2002 to study the effectiveness and performance of SunPipes.  Dr Zhang now joins Monodraught as a full-time member of staff as Head of Academic Research and Development.  Dr Zhang’s knowledge and experience in this field is second to none and he will also be refining and improving our scientific calculation methods and programming for predicting lux levels, particularly through our new Super Silver SunPipe materials.  As Head of Academic Research, Dr Zhang will also be responsible for coordinating the work at all the Universities in which we are involved, particularly Nottingham, Reading, and Brunel Universities, and will be looking at other ways to expand and extend our knowledge in our unique field and to open up the possibilities for additional Research Programmes.

Our MD, Terry Payne, has an unusual choice in ‘household pets’ at his home in Marlow!  The swan shown here regularly comes into the house for his ‘breakfast’, whilst the others wait outside on the decking.  The unusual looking ‘babies’ and their parents are known as Egyptian Geese and are now resident at Harleyford Estate in Marlow.  Terry says that the beauty with his ‘pets’ is that they don’t need looking after when he goes away on holiday!

Following hard on the heels of Lewis Hamilton, Monodraught are sponsoring the current British Kart Champion, Tom Ingram.   Tom is just 13 years old and is a local boy from High Wycombe.  Last year he won BRDC ‘Stars of Tomorrow’ Minimax, so in 10 years’ time, as they say, just “watch this space”!  Karting has always attracted a tremendous following in the UK and they start at just 8 years old progressing up to 16 years old, when they are called “Seniors”.  The Seniors have the larger engines, typically a 125cc Rotax engine and, of course, thereafter they go into the ‘big time’.  Tom’s ‘set-up’ is one of the most professional we have seen, so watch out in the future for the familiar Monodraught logo on his Ferrari-red racing kart, which should prove to be a lot of fun for the future.

At a ceremony last Friday, 11th May, Tom Ingram was presented with a special trophy by Wycombe District Council, as he was voted ‘Sports Personality of the Year’.  Previous winners have included Sir Steve Redgrave!  This is really quite a remarkable honour.

Monodraught wishes to acknowledge that, with the benefit of hindsight, statements made on its website and to certain customers during September 2005, were inadvertently misleading.  Monodraught accepts that these statements are considered by Passivent to be out of context of Passivent’s respected position in the marketplace as to the professional and commercial position of that company. 

1. That Passivent has admitted that its systems are prone to overheating.

2. That in appraising a natural ventilation system, Passivent does not take into account heat gains to be dissipated.

3. That Passivent has admitted that its offices, which were naturally ventilated with its own system, suffered from uncomfortable temperatures during summer months.

4. That Passivent has stated or implied that natural ventilation systems are always prone to overheating and are always insufficient without air conditioning.
   

The Flexible SunPipe

We launched the flexible SunPipe at last month’s National Homebuilding & Renovating Show at Birmingham, devoting almost half of the Exhibition Stand to this new product but much to our amazement, 99% of the visitors to our Stand said that they “weren’t interested”, since they readily recognised the more superior performance of the original SunPipe system and many couldn’t even understand why we had taken the trouble to launch a flexible SunPipe, since it seemed to be common knowledge that flexible lightpipes suffered from very much reduced performance!  In a way, this was a ‘backhanded compliment’ to us, since many small builders had ‘pestered us’ to bring out a cheaper, flexible version of the SunPipe, but here we had the example that when we did, the ‘informed public’ really didn’t want to know!  Obviously, from our tests, we know that the flexible SunPipe performs better than the many other flexible lightpipes on the market, simply because our system employs the patented Diamond dome and incorporates rigid lengths of SunPipe in combination with the flexible section, but it was really quite remarkable to see that the majority of the general public ‘already know’ that a flexible pipe is a relatively poor performer as compared to SunPipe.  Don’t be surprised, therefore, if you don’t see this at any future Exhibitions, since we will now keep to what we had always believed, and that is to keep promoting the remarkable ‘original’ SunPipe system!

New Controls to the
Windcatcher Range

We have launched a series of new control boxes to the complete range of Windcatcher, Suncatcher, and Sola-boost systems, and these systems are far superior to our original control boxes.  As can be seen, the new control boxes consist mainly of a series of push buttons and LED lights and we believe these will be far more ‘user friendly’ in being able to get the maximum benefit out of a natural ventilation system.  The detailed performance of each of the control panels can be described as follows:-

Windcatcher Controller
This new control panel replaces the old manual override by simply giving the end user the choice of either fully opening or fully closing the dampers regardless of the pre-programmed control strategy.  Normally the centre light would light up signifying “automatic” and it would remain like that for most of the time.  However, if the end user wanted to close the dampers (perhaps someone may have lit a bonfire outside for instance and they didn’t want the smoke to blow in) or indeed, the end user might want to fully open the dampers (say, for instance, some School children had lit a bonfire inside the Classroom - or similar!).  Basically, the damper override operates for 20 minutes and it then reverts to the auto position.

Sola-boost Controller
This control panel operates on a similar basis to the above Windcatcher controller and gives the end user five options.  They can turn the system off altogether, if they don’t want the extra ventilation, or they can have it half speed or full speed.  As for the same reasons as set out above, regardless of the automatic setting, they may want to fully open or fully close the dampers and so, they have option of pushing one of the control buttons accordingly.  If they press the “close damper” button, the fan is cut off automatically and if they close the “open damper” button, the fan cuts in, providing there is sufficient solar energy externally.

The Old 'Manual Overrides'

One of the key features of any natural ventilation system is to give the ‘end user’ the ‘final word’ in ventilation control and this is achieved by fitting every office, Classroom, or work area, with a ‘manual override’ to allow the ‘end user’ to have this ultimate control.  In travelling around various sites, however, we found that in many cases, the ‘end user’ did not really appreciate the advantage and operation of the manual override arrangement and we are, therefore, now sending out self-adhesive labels, as shown above, so that these can be affixed to the face of the existing manual overrides and this will give the ‘end user’ a much better understanding, to get the maximum benefit out of their natural ventilation system.  Our Engineers will be undertaking the fairly mammoth task of labelling up some 3,000 manual overrides up and down the country but if there are any Facility Managers or indeed, Teachers or other ‘end users’ that would like us to send a supply of these new labels, please do let us know and we will send them to you immediately.

Our Latest Customers' Comments

Every week, indeed every day, we get the most marvellous comments from customers who return their guarantee cards and below are just four of them! We have to withhold their telephone number and address details in recognition of the requirements of the Data Protection Act but nevertheless, we hope you find these 'unsolicited' responses of interest.

Sola-boost gets
Two New Nominations!

Following hard on the heels of the success of winning the “Best Building Services Product of the Year” at Interbuild last year, we are delighted to say that Sola-boost has now been shortlisted for two further prestigious Awards, the H&V News “Air Movement Product of the Year” and the Judges have also shortlisted the system for the “Renewable Product of the Year”.  This is a great compliment to this system and is indeed a reflection of the tremendous interest shown by Consulting Engineers, Architects, and Specifiers generally, to take advantage of this energy-free form of increasing the effectiveness of natural ventilation.

Even though the system was only launched in May of last year, we have already sold 1,000 systems and more specific information can be achieved by logging on to:- www.monodraught.com/sola-boost