North London Hospital – Roof Integrated Commercial Solar Water Heating
The Largest UK In Roof Commercial Solar Water Heating array at Chase Farm Hospital North London
The psychiatric medium secure unit at Camlet 3, Chase Farm Hospital was destroyed by fire late in 2008. During the rebuilding works, local planners advised that a renewable technology should now be installed to minimize the Hospitals Energy costs. LSP20+ Premium Commerial Panels were chosen based on their provenance in Industrial/Commercial Thermal Heating Systems.
Thermosolar advised our client, JCW Air-conditioning on the type of system required and offered initial design input on how best to design a system which ensures virtually zero Legionella risk and controls this in the most efficient and cost effective way.
Our solution was to provide a plate heat exchanger system removing the need to replace and reheat thousands of litres of preheated buffer water each week. The use of plate heat exchanger systems are considered on larger sized solar systems or where Legionella risks have to be aggressively managed. On larger systems with array sizes of 75m2 and above plate heat exchanger systems are used to keep energy transfer between glycol and water high.
Over the past ten years we have developed controls which can be integrated fully into BMS systems. We tailor make controls for each project depending on our client’s requirements. We use lead and lag pumps to ensure continuous running of the System. Information is displayed clearly on the front of the control panel for easy identification of potential faults and system information. We provided examples of both a solar tube and flat plate collector during the decision making process with the Hospital Trust. The Award Winning engineered flat plate to be installed as an in-roof system won over the tube type collectors. The result is an array that looks like it’s meant to be there! We believe that at 80m2 this array is the largest single system in-roof array in the UK. It is unfortunate the collectors can only be seen from within the secure unit courtyard and as it is a little tricky to gain access to the site, our final photographs had to be linked together to display the array fully.