The Challenge
One of the leading plastic manufacturers in Europe specialising in production of automotive parts was considering heat pump technologies to replace their existing 1.5MW gas boiler heating system. For advice and available options, they reached out to the ICS Cool Energy team.
During the site and system inspection, the ICS engineering team also investigated the plant’s cooling system to see if there are potential efficiency gains from installing a combination of heating and cooling systems.
The ICS team identified one of the ageing chillers in the plant, which if replaced with a more efficient technology combined with industrial Free Heating (i-FH) solution, would allow them to not only save energy on cooling but also get free heating in the same time. The customer decided to partially replace the existing system and the ICS Hire would serve as a trial for the efficiency of the new technology.
The Solution
Advantages include:
• No shutdown of the heating or cooling systems during production
• Allowing the plant to continue 24/7 operations with no interruption
• The opportunity to use OPEX instead of CAPEX
• The calculated quick return of investment
All these advantages convinced the customer to try the new technology as a hire contract vs a sale installation.
Within two weeks from the decision, the ICS Cool Energy hire team replaced the elements of the old system with a combination of a high efficiency Aptus Chiller and i-FH heat pump unit, together capable of delivering 600KW of cooling and 250kW of heating.
The i-FH heat pump was installed within the building in place of one of the old chillers, while the Aptus replaced another chiller on the roof.
The Result
By hiring the solution from ICS Cool Energy, the customer has had the chance to test and prove the efficiency and cost benefits coming from electrifying their heating system and replacing the inefficient gas boilers. The trial set-up allowed the customer to lower their energy consumption and generated annual energy savings of over 55k GBP – all with no CAPEX investment – convincing the plant to proceed with the modernisation of their system and replacing the rest of the boilers with ICS i-FH heat pump solutions.
View All Case Studies