“Many of our customers place their trust in our expertise for achieving carbon neutrality”
What does soccer have in common with a heating or ventilation system? Quite a lot, if you think about it. If a goalkeeper doesn’t line up his teammates just right to face a penalty kick, it can cost the entire match. It’s always hard to defend without a good plan. Plant construction projects also call for clear organization and practiced teamwork among those involved in sales, development, and implementation. Ex-goalkeeper Sabrina Ruis, a technician for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) technology at Bosch Energy and Building Solutions in Stuttgart, therefore sees many parallels between team sports and teamwork on the job.
How the topics of sustainability and energy shape the daily work of Bosch technician Sabrina Ruis
Challenges as motivation
Sabrina Ruis stands out as the only woman on her 12-member team in Stuttgart. But both at work and in her private life, she has always done what she wants. She played soccer for 20 years, and her other exploits have included pedaling her bicycle with a group of others from Stuttgart all the way to Berlin, jumping out of a plane with a parachute, and climbing Germany’s tallest mountain, the Zugspitze, with her boyfriend. “I enjoy challenges,” she says. “They really motivate me.” She also seeks them at work. This is made easy by the fact that her job is different every day. For example, it can happen that the finalized plans for a system have to be completely redone at short notice because it turns out that the customer has additional requirements. “It can mean recalculating everything,” says Ruis calmly. It doesn’t appear to faze her that the changes will keep her busy for several weeks.
From internship to dream job
For Ruis, the winding road to becoming a technician was anything but mapped out. While still at school she did a variety of internships to see what resonated with her. She worked in a hospital, at a hotel, and finally in an office that prepared technical drawings. “I knew at once that it was what I wanted to do. I’ve always enjoyed drawing, and I’m very thorough by nature. Plus, spatial thinking is easy for me, so it just clicked,” she recalls. After graduating she therefore trained as a technical drafter at a company specialized in ventilation and air condition technology, where she also familiarized herself with what was done in its workshop. That was followed by another training program to become a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) technician. Since 2016 she’s been at Bosch, drawing plans on a computer with the aid of appropriate CAD software: inserting systems in the layout and marking where pipes will go and where connections must be made. They are for complex projects, such as a complete cogeneration plant with all required systems.
Team spirit is key for successful planning
Sabrina Ruis belongs to the energy efficiency planning team. Its members value each other’s skills, and they all know that projects of this kind can only be smoothly implemented as a team. It means working together. “I often accompany the planner when he goes to the site to size up the situation. He meets the prerequisites for technically integrating the cogeneration plant at its future location, while I handle the detailed planning. While working on it I spot possible problems. Like, for example, that a fan for the air supply or discharge system can’t be installed as planned because a support is in the way or the legacy conduits have different diameters.” Because she’s involved in planning the details, she gains a good overview of the project. Ruis is currently working diligently to master a fresh challenge, namely building information modeling (BIM) for process digitalization. BIM enables cost-saving, effective project planning and implementation by centrally coordinating the work of everyone involved in a project and allowing them to smoothly communicate and collaborate with one another. The future is now.
Climate protection starts on a personal level
But Ruis doesn’t only sit in the office. She also carries out projects of her own and measures the energy consumption of customers’ existing HVAC systems. She checks everything and sends ideas for improving efficiency back to the team. “For example, a huge amount of power can be saved simply by replacing a fan’s electric drive. This is a technical leap forward that’s comparable with the switch from old-fashioned lightbulbs to LEDs.” Sometimes a system is so ancient that it makes more technical and economic sense to completely replace it.
“Many customers are very keen on becoming carbon-neutral, and rely on our expertise to help them achieve this goal. We also provide support for getting away from heating systems that burn fossil fuels like oil and gas and migrating to carbon-neutral heat generation, for instance using heat pumps driven by power from renewable sources. Members of our implementation team go with developers to the customer and analyze how much could be saved. Then appropriate measures are developed,” says Ruis. “And if Bosch is contracted for the job, we draw up the plans.” This is another reason why she attaches such great importance to learning new things, for example by attending in-house training courses. Climate protection is an important theme for her. On a large scale when it involves planning energy-efficient systems for customers, and of course also in her private life. She naturally also applies her knowledge to help members of her family use energy more efficiently. “Energy efficiency and climate protection are very important for everyone,” says Ruis, “and everyone can make a contribution.”
