Warmur Academy

Turning specialist hydronics expertise into a practical methodology for heating system engineers

Service

10-Step Hydronics

0 k+

Engineers trained

UK training centres

Rating from engineers

WARMUR ACADEMY 'HYDRONICS UNLOCKED'

“We came to Snowfish with what I thought was a straightforward brief: take our two-day face-to-face hydronics course and put it online. That was the wrong brief, and Jason helped us understand this.

The classroom course worked because our expert, Kimbo Betty, was in the room. Thirty years of heating systems expertise, most of it unwritten, held together by the person delivering it. Convert that directly and we would have gotten a confused learner and no way of knowing where the gaps lay. Jason’s response was not to build what we had asked for. He stopped and had us answer a different question: what do heating engineers actually need to be able to do?

That reframe produced the most valuable thing to come out of the project. Through a series of workshops, Jason got Kimbo’s expertise out of his head and onto paper, and then structured it into ten sequential steps across survey, design and installation. We now call it 10 Step Hydronics. It underpins our classroom training, our online programme, and how we talk about the work to the wider industry.

I wholeheartedly recommend Jason’s skills to your project. He’s done more than build highly engaging experiences anchored in solid pedagogy, he’s asked the deep questions that have transformed how our team thinks about teaching and learning.”

Alex Butcher, CEO, Warmur Academy

THE WARMUR ACADEMY 'HYDRONICS UNLOCKED' STORY

Unlocking hydronics

Hydronic heating systems are complex. Working closely with a “rock-star” heating systems engineer, Snowfish extracted, organised and refined decades of unwritten technical expertise and experience into a clear, repeatable ten-step process and a sophisticated blended learning programme for modern heating system designers and installers to meet the needs of a rapidly changing industry.

A conversion project that could not be converted

Warmur Academy first approached Snowfish with what sounded like a relatively straightforward brief: convert an existing two-day face-to-face hydronics course into online learning.

The classroom course had been developed and delivered by Kimbo Betty, an exceptional heating systems engineer who had spent decades challenging accepted wisdom, testing ideas on real systems and helping other engineers understand why heating systems behave as they do.

We attended the course expecting to begin planning its online equivalent. Instead, we quickly realised that a conventional conversion would not work.

Kimbo possessed an extraordinary depth of knowledge, but much of it lived in his head, not in the course materials. The classroom course brought together valuable ideas, calculations, examples and techniques, but they had accumulated over years rather than being organised into a single, consistent method.

In the classroom, Kimbo’s expertise and charisma allowed him to make connections, adapt explanations and fill gaps as he went. He could answer questions, resolve apparent inconsistencies and use his experience to make convenient shortcuts work. In a self-paced online course, those same gaps could leave learners confused or stranded.

Putting the existing content online would have digitised the fragments without joining them together. Before we could design the learning, we needed to deconstruct the subject and rebuild it from the ground up.

Getting the expertise out of an expert’s head

Snowfish led a series of intensive workshops with Kimbo, repeatedly returning to one deceptively simple question: “What do heating system engineers actually need to be able to do?”

That question shifted the focus away from everything Kimbo knew and towards the decisions and tasks other engineers needed to perform.

We explored the distinct but closely connected responsibilities of heating system designers and installers. We unpacked calculations, challenged assumptions, identified dependencies and traced how one decision affected everything that followed.

Over many weeks and months, an entire wall disappeared beneath sticky notes as we moved, grouped, questioned and refined each part of the job.

Gradually, a clear structure emerged. The work of designing and installing a heating system could be organised into ten essential, sequential steps across three phases:

This became Warmur Academy’s ’10 Step Hydronics’ methodology: a practical, repeatable process that follows the order of a real job and helps engineers know what to check, what to do next and why it works.

The methodology had not existed before our collaboration. It was created by combining Kimbo’s deep technical and practical expertise with Snowfish’s ability to analyse performance, extract tacit knowledge and create clarity from complexity.

Testing the method in the classroom

The original two-day classroom course remained popular, but we could now see an opportunity to create a more purposeful blended learning programme.

Before completing the full online experience, Snowfish and Warmur collaborated on a new one-day classroom course introducing heating systems engineers to the ten steps and the essential principles behind them.

The classroom course served two purposes. It gave engineers an immediately useful introduction to the methodology and created an appetite to explore the subject more deeply online. It also became a valuable test bed for the emerging ten-step process.

As Kimbo delivered the new course, we observed where explanations worked, where learners needed more support and where the connections between steps could be clearer. Their questions and reactions helped us continue testing and refining the methodology while the online programme was being developed.

The classroom and online experiences were therefore designed together. One provides an energetic, expert-led introduction; the other gives learners the time, interaction and repeated practice needed to develop real depth and confidence.

Designing for a changing industry

Understanding the audience was just as important as understanding the subject.

Many UK heating engineers entered the trade through practical apprenticeships rather than extended academic education. Confidence with formal mathematics and dense technical language varies considerably, and some learners may also experience dyslexia or other learning differences.

At the same time, much of the industry learned its trade during an era of relatively cheap North Sea gas, when systems could often compensate for imperfect design through higher temperatures, oversized boilers and bigger pumps.

That world is changing. Energy efficiency, energy security, environmental impact and running costs now matter more than ever. Modern condensing boilers and increasingly popular air source heat pumps depend upon lower-temperature, carefully designed systems to perform effectively.

The underlying hydronic principles have not changed, but engineers’ ability to understand and apply them has become far more important.

Our design therefore needed to make sophisticated technical concepts and mathematical calculations approachable without diluting them. Learners needed more than simplified explanations. They needed to understand the rules, see how the different parts of a system interact and practise applying that understanding to realistic jobs.

Building an experience that feels like Kimbo

Hydronics Unlocked Online begins with an introductory module that explains the changing industry context and introduces the complete ten-step methodology. Each step is then explored through its own focused module.

Each one opens with an audio introduction in Kimbo’s unmistakable style, using an uncannily accurate AI version of his own voice. This helps the online programme retain the personality, experience and directness that make his classroom teaching so engaging.

Narrated animations make underlying concepts visible. Interactive presentations and regular “What do you think?” questions encourage learners to lean forward and make sense of the content, rather than passively watching or reading.

Interactive simulations allow engineers to manipulate controls and discover how hydronic concepts and heating systems behave. Learners can change inputs, observe the consequences and build an intuitive understanding of relationships that can be difficult to grasp through diagrams or formulas alone.

Worked-example activities then place the learning into the context of realistic jobs. Learners perform calculations, make engineering decisions and see how each choice affects the next stage of the system.

These activities are carefully scaffolded. Multiple layers of feedback let learners make mistakes and learn from them, while always nudging them back toward the critical path so they can keep learning without getting stuck on a single point. The more mathematics-intensive modules also include safe-practice simulations using randomly generated but realistic values, giving learners nearly unlimited opportunities to build fluency and confidence.

The result is an online experience that captures Kimbo’s personality while doing something even an excellent classroom course cannot: allowing every learner to explore, practise, make mistakes and try again at their own pace.

From course conversion to an accredited methodology

Only recently launched, Hydronics Unlocked Online provides more than ten hours of interactive online learning, taking engineers through the full hydronic process from surveying and heat-loss calculations to system design, commissioning, balancing and controls.

The programme has also received formal industry accreditation. Learners who successfully complete the course and final assessment can achieve an Award in Low Temperature Heating and Hot Water Systems, accredited by UK Certification and recognised by MCS.

It is still too early to make claims about long-term performance impact, but the initial response from learners and across the industry has been overwhelmingly positive.

More importantly, what began as a request to convert a two-day classroom course has become something much more valuable. The ’10 Step Hydronics’ methodology now provides the foundation for Warmur Academy’s classroom training, online learning and ongoing support for heating professionals.

Kimbo’s expertise is no longer confined to one expert, one classroom or a collection of disconnected topics. It has become a coherent, scalable and teachable system that can help a new generation of engineers design better heating systems and make better decisions, whatever the heat source and whatever the job.

See more at warmuracademy.co.uk