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Tube Solar Heating System from Urban Energy Australasia

The Ulladulla Leisure Centre is an existing aquatic centre with extensive heated water requirements for use in all pools including the high temperature hydrotherapy pool. Previously, the centre was only burning LPG as their primary source of heat energy into the indoor hydrotherapy pool as standard black pool heating mat had had disappointing results.

Urban Energy Australasia was commissioned to design a renewable energy solution to heat two internal pools, a 25m lap pool and a hydrotherapy pool. Urban energy have assisted by designing, installing and commissioning an efficient, low maintenance and running cost, high life expectancy evacuated tube solar heating system as described below.

Objectives

To effectively and efficiently provide heating for a 25m lap pool and hydrotherapy pool
To use renewable sources of heat wherever possible
To reduce the cost of the generating the heated water to the facility even though no natural gas was available onsite

System Design

Standalone evacuated tube solar heating system with heat exchangers.
Solar Collection Package
12 x Seido 1/16 Sunda Evacuated tube collector's with pitching frames
Expected daily (yearly average) output 150 kWh
Expected daily summer output 240 kWh/day
Expected daily winter output 160 kWh/day

Project outcome, carbon dioxide and cost savings of system

By installing this efficient renewable energy heating system the leisure centre has saved significant quantities of carbon dioxide, the main contributor to global warming. The facility has also reduced the running costs of the centre dramatically. In fact, the leisure centre has reduced the heating bill of the inside pools by a staggering 80% since the installation.

With the great success from the heating of the initial project, Urban Energy Australasia was reappointed to expand the project to include an extra 8 solar thermal panels to bring the total array to 20 solar evacuated tube panels and an extra change to heat the 50 m exterior pool in the summer, and to further heat the inside pools in the winter.

The installed system has an estimated saving of 94 Tonnes CO2 per year compared with electric element heating, or that is a 0.9kg of CO2 saving per kWh delivered compared with direct electric element heating.

Over a 15 year lifetime:

Each panel is equivalent to planting 353 Trees
Total array equivalent to planting 4,236 Trees
The current system covers about 70% of the heating water demand by using solar thermal panels.

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