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HEAT PUMPS FOR HOTEL HOT WATER
SHUTTING DOWN THE FUEL BOILER AND SAVING BIG MONEY
Fuel prices will be going to US$1.00 per liter again and it is thus time to seriously reconsider replacing fuel-fired boilers with heat-pumps.
A 300 room hotel might save US$ 80,000 per year…..
This is why:
Cost Comparison
Even if your current fuel boiler is 80% efficient (which is VERY rare), so that 1 liter of fuel (46 MJ/kg = 12.7 kWh) provides 10.2 kWh of heating, so that in turn 1 m3 of water heated from 30 C to 55 C (29 kWh), will need $2.32 of fuel.
Our air-source heat-pumps will do the same job for $0.72 in electricity costs, and our water-source units can even do it for $0.18 per m3 in the case that we can connect to the chiller return circuits (and thus save 75% of heat-pump running costs by assisting the chiller). This is a saving of 70%, up to 90%
How Does This Work
Heat Pumps for domestic hot water are really clever, simple machines. They work exactly the same as an air-conditioning unit (compressor, evaporator, condenser, working with refrigerant), but, where air-conditioners are optimized for extracting heat (= cooling) from a room and then throw away that heat outside (= heating), heat pumps extract heat from ambient air, or a water source (= cooling) and are optimized to add that heat ( = heating) to water to make hot water.
The really clever part of this is that it takes 1 kWh electrical energy run the system to extract 3 kWh of heat from a source side (= cooling) and to add that 3 kWh, PLUS the 1 kWh input, to the hot water side ( = heating). Thus, with one kWh electrical energy, we get 4 kWh heating and 3 kWh cooling (= negative heating).
Thus, if we connect a water-source heat pump to a chiller return line on the source side, all this heat-extraction (= cooling) becomes free cooling that assists the chiller. When a 60 kW heat pump is running, it uses 15 kW in electricity (heating COP = 4), BUT it also assists the chiller with 45 kW cooling (cooling COP = 3) and in turn, this saves 11 kW electrical power for the chiller (chiller COP = 4). The net operating power thus becomes only 4 kW electricity for 60 kW of water heating and 45 kW of cooling assistance!
It sounds like a miracle but it is just simple physics.
Return On Investment
Typically, a 180 kW capacity heat-pump installation that produces 100 m3 of hot water per day would require an investment of approximately US$160,000. Where this quantity of daily hot water would cost US$ 232 /day or US$ 6,960 per month, with heat pumps, this cost would be reduced to US$ 720 or, in the case of chiller savings being possible, even as little as US$ 180 per month.
This results in a typical Return-On-Investment of 25 months or less! (usually less)
Leasing or Renting
In many cases, we can provide complete heat-pump installations under 3, 4 or 5 year rental or lease-to-own contracts, avoiding capital expenditure.
The monthly savings on fuel will more than cover these lease or rental costs. In the above mentioned example, the monthly rent would be around US$5,000 (for 4 years), saving US$2,000 per month from Day One, AND at the end of the rental period, you can purchase the installation at 30%.
A 4-year lease-to-own scenario would cost around US$ 6,000 per month, still saving almost US$1,000 per month and you would own the installation outright after the 4 years.
Laundries
In some hotels, the fuel boilers are also used to provide steam to the laundry. After eliminating the fuel usage for hot water, it can be considered to replace that last bit of fuel usage with (leaner, cleaner and cheaper) electrical steam boilers or small gas-fired boilers.
Please contact our team to get the ball rolling with an obligation-free offer!
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