In Sant Andreu de la Barca, near Barcelona in northern Spain, stands the Sant Llop Church. It is a modern church, designed by the architect Oriol Florejachs. In Spain as in many other countries, maintaining the right temperature inside churches is a problem: they are often too warm in summer but cold in the winter. However, Sant Llop being a newly built church it was possible to create a solution for ensuring an even temperature all year round.
’The aim was to find an environment-friendly way of creating a pleasant indoor climate in the church’, says Bartomeu Casals of NIBE in Spain. The system installed makes use of a 25kW NIBE heat pump which can be used for both heating and cooling.
’The system makes use of air ducts under the church floor for circulating the warm or cool air. Openings from the ducts channel the heated or cooled air to where the congregation stands during services’, Bartomeu explains.
’This solution gives you a large effect from a relatively small pump, since the heating or cooling is released directly where people stand.
The heating or cooling is done through radiators with fans, where the air is blown in through a system of warm or cool pipes.
In the case of cooling in the summer the compressor in the heat pump is not used. The water in the radiators becomes warmer when the hot summer air is blow through. As the radiator water is circulated it comes back to the heat pump where it leaves of excess temperature to the pipes leading down to the borehole, before returning nice and cool to the radiators.
The borehole was drilled in the church garden, and the whole installation process only took one week. The NIBE system has two major benefits: the church’s heating costs are 72% lower compared to a traditional system; and there are clear positive effects for the environment – as there is no fuel being burned, there are no carbon dioxide emissions.
NIBE was the first company in Spain to supply ground source heat pumps. When the church was looking for a supplier, NIBE had already completed sixty installations in the country – no other company in the country had a similar level of experience in the field.