Water water everywhere!

Imagine the costs of running a regional sports and leisure centre with almost 400,000 visitors annually, a 25m pool, a 12.5m teaching pool, steam rooms and sauna, sports hall with seating capacity for more than 1,000 spectators as well as squash, racquetball and handball courts, a state of the art gym, outdoor playing pitches and floodlit astroturf pitches?  Enough to make even the seasoned athlete break into a hot sweat!

At one such centre in County Kerry, its energy bills account for the majority of its overall running costs.

That’s why the centre manager decided to call in some expert advice; the result?  Installing a combined heat and power – or CHP unit – at the Centre.

In addition to these savings, further ones were highlighted as being achievable by replacing older, inefficient heating equipment with modern alternatives.

The Centre is now the proud owner of an ENER-G 75P unit based around a Mercedes LPG-fired engine which simultaneously generates 75Kw of electricity and 140Kw of heat.

‘The main advantage of this type of unit is that, during the day, the vast majority of electricity used in the complex is generated on-site instead of being imported from the grid.  This fact, along with the very competitive LPG tariff, has led to massive reductions of an amazing 60% in electricity bills,’ commented our Centre Manager.

The solution also saw the installation of two 115Kw LPG fired condensing boilers to replace the Centre’s outdated main oil burner.  The remaining boiler had its oil burner replaced with an LPG burner and now serves as a backup to the main system during maintenance.  The hot water system for the showers and sinks had its existing calorifier replaced with a highly efficient rapid recovery model from ACV.  The tank-in-tank design of the unit offers far more surface area for heat exchange, enabling large volumes of hot water supply from a small volume of storage.  This minimises the heat losses associated with hot water storage and increases savings further.

In conclusion: ‘I would estimate that by the end of a full year in operation, the Centre will have made a savings equivalent of two additional jobs which is great news in this economic climate.  Another very significant change is that we now have much more control over our energy usage because we are able to monitor it constantly.’