SHARC Energy has widened its offering by launching the PIRANHA™ wastewater heat recovery system in the UK and EU.
The PIRANHA is described as a compact wastewater heat recovery system that offers both a strong commercial opportunity and reliable, renewable heat to medium sized businesses and premises, and sits alongside their larger SHARC systems.
SHARC Group Chief Operating Officer (UK) Russell Burton said the PIRANHA “represents a significant milestone for the SHARC technology in our market.”
The firm provides technology that effectively recovers heat from wastewater – an almost limitless resource that SHARC says “is typically discarded without a second thought but can provide a very significant proportion of the heat required for a large business, a swimming pool complex or a district heat network.”
These heat recovery systems are currently deployed worldwide but, in Europe, have so far been limited to larger installations. With the European launch of SHARC’s compact PIRANHA system, sewage and wastewater heat recovery becomes available to a much wider range of premises. The firm describes it as “a self-contained system that intercepts wastewater and extracts the heat using a unique heat exchanger and uses an in-built heat pump to return hot water to the building at around 60ºC.” The literature adds that “PIRANHA is quiet and highly efficient, with a typical Co-efficient of Performance (CoP) of around five.”
A PIRANHA, typically, can recover heat for hotels, nursing homes, student accommodation or apartment blocks. The firm has provided the case study below, by way of illustration.
Case study: Lake Louise Inn, Banff
One of the earliest installations was at the Lake Louise Inn in Banff, Canada, which nestles within the Banff National Park, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Lake Louise Inn has nearly 200 rooms across eleven different types, some of which include hot tubs, and there is an indoor swimming pool. There is also a very busy laundry room. Lake Louise Inn uses a significant amount of energy to heat all the water they need for all their facilities and, until recently and just like virtually every other hotel in the world, all that energy was poured down the drain and wasted.
A PIRANHA T10 unit was commissioned in September 2018, and during a data gathering exercise over the first two weeks of October 2018 ran for an average of 12 hours per day, producing a daily heat output of 1.5 million BTU, the equivalent of heating nearly 10,000 litres (6,000 US gallons) of water from 10ºC to 60ºC (50 – 140ºF). Lake Louise Inn’s laundry room is propane heated, and over a 52-week period the PIRANHA system will reduce their propane requirement by 30,000 litres (6,667 gallons), and the equivalent of 80 tonnes of CO2 reduction.
Across North America and Europe alone over 330 billion litres of wastewater is discharged daily. This wastewater has the potential to replace over 1.5 billion MWhr of natural gas consumption used for space and water heating.
