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Meadow Park retrofit almost complete

Solar hot water heating up and running; geothermal to be operational within two weeks

If you took a shower or washed your hands at Meadow Park Sports Centre over the past few weeks, most of the heat in the water you used came from the sun.

A $930,000 retrofit of the recreation centre to install solar panels and a geo-exchange system to draw heat from underground is nearing completion. The solar hot water system has been up and running for almost a month, and the ground source heat pump will be in operation in the next week or two, said Ted Battiston, manager of Sustainability Initiatives at the municipality.

“We’re very, very close,” he said. “We would expect by the end of next week… that the pool heating will be handled by those heat pumps.”

The project is about six weeks behind schedule because of some unforeseen challenges with drilling for the ground source heat pump, Battiston said, with a few different drilling companies having to be called in. Contractor Keith Plumbing and Heating had guaranteed the project to be completed by December 2009.

With commissioning of the system previously slated for mid-January, the project is about six weeks behind, he said. However, the retrofit is still ahead of the timeframe outlined in the municipality’s request for proposals, which eyed completion of the geothermal portion in the summer of 2010.

Because the retrofit is under a fixed-price, design-build contract, there are no budget implications for the municipality because of the delays, Battiston said.

The final grading and landscaping of the area that was drilled will be completed in April after the ground thaws, he said.

So far, the solar system has been exceeding expectations, Battiston said. Designed to heat the water for the centre’s sinks and showers, or the domestic hot water, the solar system does most of the work and then the traditional boilers heat the water the remaining couple of degrees, he said.

But on some of the sunny days during the 2010 Olympics, the solar system was providing about 100 per cent of the heat to the domestic water supply, Battiston said — more than it was even designed to do. According to information panels about the project, the system is designed to meet about 35 per cent of the domestic hot water needs.

“At the moment it’s averaging somewhere in the neighbourhood of 75 per cent,” Battiston said. “It has been performing… really, really well.”

Hard numbers on the preliminary energy savings and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions won’t be available for another month or so, he said, with the commissioning of the monitoring system to be done after the geothermal system is up and running.

According to a staff report, the system is projected to save $115,000 to $140,000 in heating costs each year and reduce the building’s GHG emissions by 60 per cent.

Despite the fact that the project was not complete in time for the 2010 Olympic Games, Battiston said there was still interest from members of the media and dignitaries. More attention is expected as the system’s energy savings and GHG reductions can be demonstrated with data, he added.

When Whistler council voted in July 2009 to award Keith Plumbing and Heating with the contract, councillors Ralph Forsyth and Ted Milner were in opposition. At the time, they both commented that it was not the right time to spend almost $1 million on such a project.

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