The Ian Stewart Recreation Centre serves the University and surrounding area with an ice rink, fitness area, engineering labs,
alumni offices and other purposes.

The project involved the replacement of the chiller and dehumidifier at the Ian Stewart centre.

The custom built refrigeration plant had its charge dropped by over 60% reducing risk to the facility and surrounding areas. This was accomplished by changing to a more efficient plate and frame configuration that is more serviceable and able to be rebuilt resulting in longer system life.   The titanium heat exchanger plates are highly durable and will result in a longer operating life. Due to the longer system volume the control of the refrigerant flows needed to be much more finely controlled than its previous configuration.

In addition, heat reclaim was added into the system with the high grade super heat being utilized to provide heat for domestic hot water, and the compressor jacket heat being utilized for underfloor heating. This represented the best usage of multiple grades of heat available from the system and the additional cooling results in a higher system efficiency.

Advanced control logic was applied to the systems to more accurately control temperature and save substantial pumping energy by utilizing variable frequency drives. Trim and demand style algorithms were incorporated into the setpoints to further optimize the system efficiency.

In addition to the ice plant the dehumidifier was replaced which had previously been a high usage of gas and was not effective at maintain the levels within the desired parameters. The dehumidifier low grade heating return water to regenerate and then recovers heat off its own exhaust to preheat incoming air via an heat recovery ventilator, the net result is over an 1,100 GJ reduction in natural gas consumption while maintaining space conditions in the specified parameters.

This project was submitted to Fortis BC as part of a custom grant application and was incentivized for its implementation.