Hotel new energy centre

Pratis House Wedding Venue, Fife

Pratis House is a newly renovated building being used as accommodation for a high quality wedding venue. The accommodation spans 3 floors with a new conservatory and
multiple bathrooms.

With a long term plan to develop and heat all buildings on the site using a networked heat pump system, the system had to be ‘heat pump ready.’

The challenge of such a system is the variability of the load with a profile of high weekend usage and low weekday usage. Hot water is especially challenging balancing hot
water at peak times with the Legionalla risk of stagnant stored water with no occupancy.

Solution

The system design was carried out with Solid Future and Haber Ltd.

The radiator circuit splits into three circuits and uses appropriately sized radiators for low system temperatures and underfloor heating for the new conservatory.

A small condensing oil boiler installed with 500l buffer tank supply the heat and plate heat exchanger with a variable flow primary circuit are used for hot water. Instantaneous hot water production utilises no stored potable water and therefore Legionella risks are virtually eliminated.

A Siemens control system based around the PXC4 automation station was chosen to fulfil the challenging system requirements.

The provision of hot water was especially tough given no storage capacity, instantaneous production and highly variable load. A modulating 2 port control valve is under analogue control to provide responsive and accurate primary hot water requiring no further mechanical blending. Hot water priority is achieved by short term ramping down of the heating circuits.

HVA Systems monitoring platform Ventana was used for several months of operation to monitor and log system performance and enable optimisation of controls.

Results

The system is providing efficient, reliable and controllable heating
and hot water to a high quality wedding accommodation venue. The integration of system design and control has enabled a challenging specification to be met with a small oil boiler and at temperatures enabling a future changeover to a heat pump solution.

The Siemens PXC4 automation station provides a cost effective and reliable system ideal for control of plant rooms and heating systems of any size.

HVA Systems Ventana online monitoring system enabled the
controls to be optimised in the 3 month period following
commissioning. The one minute data logging interval and visual
interface gave a 24 hour monitoring system - essential for checking
system performance and monitoring the effect of parameter
changes.

System optimisation was carried out using the data collected
and displayed on Ventana. The effect of parameter and minor
programming changes to system performance was easily monitored and this allowed for the optimal setup.