Creative solar thermal installation generates savings at Colorado housing complex.
Residents of a condominium complex in the ski resort town of Breckenridge, Colo., are getting their money’s worth and then some thanks to the installation of an innovative solar thermal system.
Local solar guru Bob Kingston, of RE-Align Technology, was brought in by Mark Stearns of Mech Tech, the project mechanical contractor. The team was rounded out by Sunshine Solar and Mechanical’s William Frew and Alpine Heating Services’ Lumir Pajaj to design, fabricate and install in the 60-unit Long Branch Condominiums a solar thermal system that satisfies residents’ domestic hot water needs while also providing heat to the indoor spa, pool and sauna. More importantly, the new system has shaved money off residents’ energy bills and generated a government tax rebate for each one.
The team installed 28 SolarHot collectors on the three-story roof spread across nine arrays for optimal snow shedding (Breckenridge received 500 inches of snow last winter). “Twenty-eight and nine are not divisible into each other,” Kingston says with a laugh. “We really had to balance the arrays and the flows.” The aging spa and pool gas-fired heaters were removed and a 1,400-gallon solar storage tank (with 4 in. of polystyrene insulation skinned with diamond plating) was added along with five oversized flat-plate heat exchangers and two titanium pool/spa heat exchangers.
“On the way to financial justification with this project, the complex’s boilers for the pool and spa hit end of life,” states Kingston, who holds a degree in nuclear engineering. “We needed to have a place to dump heat and the pool and spa were ideal locations. We teamed the solar with their central boilers and that’s how the pool and spa are now heated. It saved them from having to replace those two boilers.” An 80-gallon recovery tank recovers glycol in case the power goes out and the system overheats.