Halmstad Golf Club is one of the finest golf courses in Sweden. In September 2007 the club will be hosting the prestigious Solheim Cup tournament. As demanded by a top-class club, the course has a
top-class clubhouse. When the clubhouse was extended and renovated earlier this year, a new heating solution was installed at the same time, based entirely on NIBE heat pumps.
With a history dating back to 1935, the course in Tylösand has an impressive past. Today it has two eighteen-hole courses – the North Course and the South Course. As is often the case with establishments with a long history, the solutions to the various technical requirements of the building had started living a life of their own and become rather diversified. So when the time had come to renovate the clubhouse it was natural to install a completely new heating system at the same time.
’In Sweden today, the central heating in commercial properties is generally speaking one of the two dominant kinds’, says Claes-Uno Nilsson at SI-Konsult, who was the project manager in charge of installing the golf club’s new heating system. ’Those two methods are district heating, and heatpump based systems. And heat pumps are taking a bigger and bigger share of the market, since a lot of property owners are wary of tying themselves to a single supplier, which is what happens if you connect to distrcit heating.’
The club used to have a variety of heating systems. Oil, electricity – you name it. This meant high heating costs, and complicated maintenance, so when Halmstad Golf Club rebuilt the clubhouse a decision was made to install a heatpump system using boreholes, and with everything placed in one boiler-room. The entire new system is connected to an alarm centre; it is constantly monitored, and all the measurement data is stored. Any irregularities in the functioning of the system trigger an alarm which alerts the technicians at the alarm centre, who can thus deal with the problem before the people at the club have even noticed it.
’We could just as easily have chosen a system using shallow ground source heat. But considering that this is a golf club, we wanted to interfere as little as possible in the production – in other words, the playing of golf!’ Claes-Uno explains. ’That’s why we decided to drill instead of digging – to ruin as little as possible of the fairway.’
In total the system heats – and cools – 2 000 m². ’We’ve had a few warm summers lately’, says Claes-Uno. ’Using a heat pump system for cooling gives you an extremely costefficient solution. And at the same time you’re storing heat in the bedrock for the coming winter.’
This concept is called ”free cooling”, and it means that the heat-pump compressor is not in use – only the circulation pumps. The cooling medium in the pipes from the boreholes is led straight into the building’s cooling system, either through the ventilation system or through separate fanconvectors. The warm indoor air is passed across the pipes containing the cool fluid, thereby falling in temperature. The now slightly warmer cooling medium is then recirculated down into the borehole where it is cooled again, before being returned up into the cooling system.
’During this process the heat pump is not running, only the circulation pumps. So this is a very cost-efficient way to keep a building cool’, says Fredrik Snygg of NIBE. ’Especially when you consider that you get the cooling as a ”bonus”; there’s no need to invest in a separate cooling system.’