The heating and cooling system in any large building is usually the largest consumer of electricity. Hotel Verde’s advanced system achieves extraordinary efficiency using a geothermal loop field coupled to ground source heat pumps for central heating/cooling and domestic water heating.

The geothermal loop field is a closed system and is coupled to four heat pumps that do the active heating and cooling. Because heat pumps run on a refrigeration cycle they both cool on one side and heat on the other. This is similar to a household fridge where the energy from the compartment is extracted, making it cold, and dissipated from the radiator at the back of the fridge (which gets hot).

If both the heating and cooling effect is utilised your efficiency is dramatically increased, as is the case at Hotel Verde. The heating is used for heating both conditioned air for the building as well as the domestic hot water. The cooling side is used for cooling conditioned air.

Unfortunately the hot and cold sides are seldom equally needed; in winter there is a higher heating demand (more and longer showers, more space heating) and in summer mostly a higher cooling demand. This imbalance is what is rectified through the geothermal field.

The ground temperature below the building site is a constant 19.4°C throughout the year while the outdoor temperatures can range from about 3°C to 35°C. The geothermal field consists of 100 boreholes, each approximately 65m deep. Each hole contains a HDPE U-bend pipe. Combined there is approx 13 km of piping beneath the footprint of the building. This intelligent system is able to pass water through these pipes to either dump heat (in summer) or gain heat (in winter) from the constant ground temperature thus using the earth as a thermal battery and gaining significant efficiency.

This system is anticipated to save approx. 50% of the electrical energy that a conventional system would use.

In many of the public areas ventilation is controlled via occupancy sensors or key card readers which only automatically turn on the air conditioning when a room is occupied thus saving unnecessary energy in conditioning an unoccupied room.

Thermostats are strategically placed and areas separated into zones to maximise occupancy comfort while minimising energy use.

Watch Video