Space Air on heat recovery
Energy consumption costs money, uses diminishing natural resources, and contributes to pollution and global warming. All of us share a responsibility to use energy prudently and wisely.
As we know, mechanical heating, ventilating, and air- conditioning (HVAC) systems account for much of the energy costs in our commercial buildings.
Heat gains and losses from various sources must be offset to create an efficiently balanced, comfortable, healthy indoor environment. Rejected heat from one location may be extremely useful elsewhere in the building, so it makes complete sense (and often is highly cost-effective) to recover energy that might otherwise be wasted, particularly in a time of rising energy costs.
Heat recovery is a process of capturing the heat that would normally be rejected from a chiller condenser during its cooling cycle and redirecting it for space heating, domestic water heating or any other process that requires heat. Heat recovery has been successfully applied in all types of buildings, including hotels, schools, manufacturing plants and office buildings.
It typically provides an attractive return on investment for building owner/operators.
The use of heat recovery should be considered in any building with simultaneous heating and cooling requirements, or in facilities where the heat can be stored for future use.
Buildings such as hotels with high year-round internal cooling loads combined with high hot water demand are also excellent opportunities for heat recovery. Importantly, heat recovery can allow for downsizing or even eliminating existing fossil fuel, combustion based heating equipment such as boilers.
Heat recovery can be applied to practically any type of water chiller. It can be accomplished either by operating at higher condensing temperatures and recovering heat from the water leaving the standard condenser, or by using a separate condenser.
Heat recovery can also be achieved using a device called a desuperheater. This is a plate heat exchanger that is connected to the refrigerant circuit between the compressor and condenser to recover heat from the hot refrigerant vapour.
Space Air recently supplied an hotel project, where, in addition to satisfying the cooling demand, the heat recovery option on the 320kW Daikin chiller provided hot water to 4 x 500 litre indirect DHW cylinders. The hotel’s hot water demand was thus effectively pre- heated, dramatically reducing the output required of the new high efficiency gas boilers.
The result was significant kW savings in energy and huge reductions in gas consumption.
For more information email marketing@spaceair.co.uk
