Initial impacts of the implementation of the regulations on solar collectors
2.1. The education and training for project design professionals
Portuguese Civil Engineers are the legal responsible professionals for elaborate the water supply design projects. Until now they had to deal with simple equipments of hot water production but now they need to calculate a more complex and integrated system. After consulting a sufficient number of senior project design Civil Engineers they have responded that they are not very comfortable with this new technology and with all that is related with mechanical equipments. Traditional projects in the pass never forced them to know more about equipment subjects. Buildings are until now predominantly constructive but they are aware that intelligent and automatic buildings are a future inevitable reality. Despite there are some standard systems that function like a kit module, it is not sufficient to respond efficiently to the building design demand. In some cases, they are letting the design of solar collector system to be developed later by the installation firms with negative consequences on final building quality. Thus, it is absolutely essential that official institutions promote and stimulate even more training for these professionals. The process is been slow but some are making efforts to get training. Also, recent graduate Civil Engineers, who have just finishing theirs courses, faced almost the same problem mainly because many of the Institutions of Higher Education in Portugal still do not provide the required competencies on these subjects. In most of the courses there is still not an adequate and integrated group of curricular subjects that goes deep in these matters, providing the minimal competencies to accomplish sufficient professional practice in this area. Therefore, it would be necessary to make a great effort to introduce on the curricular course structures even more contents on those matters. And we can not forget other important aspect, as the firm’s know-how is still not very high there is always a tendency to charge more for the installation and maintenance operations and give not so qualified engineering consultant. Now, these firms must be prepared to correspond to a more informed attitude from design professionals.
