Pasta Manufacturer Offsets Boiler-Heating with i-FH Heat Pumps and Reduces Heating Costs by 68%

ICS Cool Energy, an international market leader specialising in complete temperature control solutions for manufacturing process and facilities applications, replaced a fossil-fuel heating system with new Industrial Free Heating (i-FH) hire solution at a pasta manufacturing facility.

During the four months of operations, the customer calculated that replacing the gas boiler with ICS Cool Energy i-FH heat pumps reduced the heat generation costs by approximately 68% from 7.4k GBP to 2.3k GBP, also contributing to lowering the carbon footprint of the plant and more sustainable operations.

“Electrification is one of the most efficient and scalable solutions to decarbonize heat, also in the process applications,” said Richard Payne, marketing director at ICS Cool Energy. “Our customers are demanding improved, energy efficient systems, and we’re proud to offer them a full range of applicable solutions. Our heat pumps use renewable energy from the air, from water or from the ground, and can deliver at least 3 kW of heating for 1 kW of electricity. For comparison, on a boiler or traditional heater, for every 1 kW burned you get less than 1 kW of useful heat.”

The project started when the pasta manufacturer approached ICS Cool Energy hire team looking for a temporary cooling capacity to cover the additional summer load in their plant. During the site visit, the ICS Cool Energy team learnt about the customer’s overall cooling and heating demands. Familiar with the manufacturer’s efforts to improve the energy efficiency of their operations, the team proposed a new heat pump solution that would not only deliver the additional cooling capacity the customer was looking for, but also completely replace the plant’s 300kW fossil-fuelled boiler heating system – generating significant energy savings in return.

ICS Cool Energy team installed two i-FH (Industrial Free Heating) heat pumps with 184kW and 264 kW of net cooling capacities, and 216kW and 311kW of net heating capacities respectively, connecting them with the plant’s existing chillers. This allowed to harness the waste heat that typically gets lost to atmosphere during cooling process. The new renewable energy heating set up offered the manufacturer new opportunities to lower their energy consumption and associated costs.