Barres Plant Room - Progress

The internal work in the plant room is now almost complete aside from the heat pump refrigeration pipe and our focus has now moved to our old building where we are installing a new buffer tank and Europa domestic hot water heat pump. This buffer tank will be fed by the 60kW Ochsner GMLW heat pump in the main plant room.

The insulation jacket for the main buffer tank is now in place, and the expansion vessels will be going in soon.

The main heating flow and return pipe up to the PAW pump kits has been installed, two of these heating circuits will heat our main building, and the other will heat a buffer tank in the building across the road. The buffer tank on the right has also been connected up. The flow and return pipes you can see leaving the room to the right are the pipes going to the existing oil boiler in the room adjacent, which is also getting connected into the system.

Outside the building, the concrete and gravel base for the evaporator will be going down shortly, along with the ducting for the pipe-work.

In the picture on the right, you can see an Ochsner Europa IWP mini heat pump mounted on the wall beside the Unifresh tank. This unit is designed to provide domestic hot water, and has an output of approximately 2.5kW while only consuming 600W of electricity. It can also help to cool a room, as it draws warm air from the room, and returns cooler air back. We plan to use this to help cool the main open plan office. These units are also very useful in properties with solar PV - even on a slightly overcast day, it is likely that most PV systems will still be generating enough power to allow the Europa to run for free.

Preliminary fitting of pipe-work has begun. All pipe-work will be carbon steel and fittings will be Mapress.

Once finished, our plant room will be available for customers and installers to come and see the equipment running in a real life situation.

The biggest bits of equipment are now in place and ready to start running some of the pipe-work. The 1500 litre buffer tank is on the left, followed by the Ochsner GMLW 60 air source heat pump, and then the 500 litre Unifresh tank on the right. You can see now why we needed to remove the ceiling in here!

This is our empty plant room, and we are ready to begin. The plant going in here will be used to heat our building, and our other building across the road using a long run of district heating pipe-work. Due to a minor measuring error, we discovered that the 1500 litre buffer tank we had ordered was too tall for the plant room, so we had to get the ceiling removed... whoops! However, it does mean we have a lot more space to work with and should make for a nicer looking and less cramped plant room.