Company Announcement - No, it’s not another #feesmustfall story, but an ingenious solution to a potentially expensive problem carried out by Elemental Energy.

To enable students to live in town near the University of Johannesburg, old grain silos in Newtown have been converted into dwellings, with additional accommodation supplied by steel shipping containers balanced on top of the towers. Hot water was being supplied by a system installed about 3 years ago, consisting of 3 x 3000-litre hot water storage tanks heated by an older ‘circulation type’ heat pump. However, it became apparent in the winter of 2015 that the heat pump could not keep up with the hot water demand.

As the number of students being accommodated was further increasing by some 25%, it became clear that a new solution was needed. One suggested answer was the potentially expensive exercise of installing another 3000 litre tank – difficult to implement due to the limited space available.

Elemental Energy were called in and after careful calculations were made, it became clear that the answer was the additional installation of an Alliance ‘direct heating’ Heat Pump, without any extra water storage facility being required. Having installed 42kW Alliance Heat Pumps for the previous 5 years, Elemental Energy decided on installing a new 80kW Alliance Heat Pump – the first one to be installed in South Africa.

States Bruce Thomas of Elemental Energy: ‘The main problem with the hot water supply was a peak demand time of around 3 hours when water temperature dropped. But because of the direct heating-type operation of the Alliance Heat Pump, it can immediately supplement the supply by 1000 litres of hot water per hour during peak draw time even during worst-case winter ambient temperatures. This would rise to approximately 3000 litres/hour in summer. No additional water storage would thus be necessary – the water is piped directly into the hot water feed to the building providing an ample supply.’

The project was awarded to Elemental Energy on the 2nd November 2015 and the system commissioned by Wednesday 11th November. ‘As the Heat Pump is situated halfway up the building, we had to use a large crane to get it into position, but the connections to the existing hot water supply were easily made. Post installation monitoring of the hot water consumption and heat pump run times have left us with no doubt that there will be ample hot water available for all even during the coldest winter temperatures,’ concludes Thomas.