Pump Sets to Serve Heating Systems from Kelair Pumps Australia

Case Study
Sales Engineer Andrew Howland (NSW)

Energy-saving and ease of maintenance and monitoring at major hospital

Kelair was recently engaged to supply packaged pump sets to serve heating systems on a major upgrade of a Sydney hospital.

The design brief called for four separate closed-loop Warm Water circulation systems and one closed loop Hot Water circulation system.

A mandatory requirement was to limit the heat loss through each system to a maximum of 3 degrees Celsius. The design brief also required the pumps to be capable of being fine tuned to meet the installed system requirement in flow and head. Energy efficiency was also a prerequisite.

Of key importance to the plumbing contractor was the time to install the units on-site due to a compressed construction programme. Hospital maintenance staff required ease of maintenance and the ability to quickly monitor discharge and suction return temperatures.

Following a number of meetings Kelair was able offer a pump set design which satisfied all the stake holder requirements.

Kelair offered close coupled motor pumps with wetted parts of 304 and 316 stainless steel for improved durability. The units were supplied with fully-valved and piped suction and discharge manifolds with unit-mounted and pre-wired control panels in order to minimise site installation time.

A flow sensor was installed on the common discharge manifold and wired back to a local alarm and BMS contacts in the control panel to give hospital staff early warning of low flow conditions. A LED digital display together with a temperature transducer was provided in the control panel for the discharge and suction temperatures and connected to the BMS system to allow the hospital staff to easily monitor the temperatures both locally at the panel and remotely in the control room.

In order to fine-tune the performance of the pumps to match the installed system requirements, a frequency inverter was provided for each pump motor. This enables the rotational speed to be adjusted to match the system requirement and only expend the required energy to satisfy that demand.

As the pumps are running at reduced speed this led to power reductions of up to 40% over operating fixed speed pumps designed to satisfy the initial design demand points.

The systems are currently maintaining a differential temperature of between 1.4 and 2.6 degrees Celsius over the five systems which is an excellent result considering the large lengths of some of the circuits.