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Godfrey of Peninsula Plumbing and Charl of TRIOCON described how each unit has access to hot water immediately ( students apparently get very touchy when there is no hot water !)
Because of the shape of the building , it was necessary to divide it into three pressure zones , namely ,
The low zone , middle zone and then the upper zone . Because the middle zone was to big to handle as one entity we sub divided it into two zones , effectively creating four zones .
The reasoning behind this that with any large system a failure is catastrophic but by dividing into smaller areas total system failure risk is eliminated and faults can be attended to faster than one large system .
How was this achieved ? Twelve heat pumps and booster pumps as required for the various
1 . Cold water booster pumps taking water from the cold water stoorgae tanks and distributing through the building
2 . cold water bypass line control valves to the hot water storage tanks ..
3 . Stainless steel pipes supplied by Geberit Mapess
pressure zones were installed . This provided efficiency as was required in the brief together with energy saving and low operating cost .
Why heat pumps ? Economics , as electricity tariffs increase as with the cost of other elements like oil , gas , etc . It is a characteristic of heat pump-based systems that heating is stretched over a long period of time , so we use storage and buffering to compensate to generate water over a long period of time , but at a low cost . Put another way hot water is required at peak times i . e ., morning and evening and the heat pumps simply cannot provide the large amounts of heat instantaneously .
The system at Cape Station is really designed to generate the total
www . plumbingafrica . co . za @ plumbingonline @ plumbingonline @ PlumbingAfricaOnline August 2024 Volume 30 I Number 6