Golden Harvest opts for solar water heating

Golden Harvest has installed a Thermomax Solar Water Heating System at its new factory in the San Gwann Industrial Estate. The system incorporates the latest heat pipe vacuum tube technology designed by Thermomax, a company that specialises in solar technology transfer.

The new system is designed to provide all the hot water requirements in the factory, both for production as well as for sanitary facilities b.NEL Engineering were the consultants for this project. Panta Marketing supplied and installed this engineering system.

Heating of water for production purposes had previously relied on a more complicated engineering system incorporating fuel fire boilers that required routine maintenance and suffered periodic breakdowns.

Other systems that were considered were electric heating and LPG gas-fired boilers. These are cleaner and require less maintenance but electric heating is far more expensive.

Thermomax was chosen since solar collectors are very efficient since radiant heat is captured even on cloudy days. Moreover, the system is backed up by a thermal recovery and storage system that ensures that the thermal energy received from the collector is transmitted and stored at the storage vessel with the minimum energy loss and energy usage. Golden Harvest's Managing Director, John Aquilina, expressed his satisfaction at the performance of the new system. He said that his company has decided to go solar, both for economic purposes and for environmental reasons. "Solar energy is free and will help us to reduce our daily running costs while, at the same time, contributing to lower carbon dioxide loads in our atmosphere".

The newly installed Thermomax system consists of 10 solar collectors of 30 tubes each, equivalent to a total of 30 square metres of solar absorption area.

The absorbed heat is conveyed to the heating batteries of hot water calorifiers via fully insulated copper pipe work. A smart electronic controller controls the Thermomax system by monitoring the temperature of the water at several strategic points in the system.

This controller switches the primary circulation pumps on and off as well as the electrical back-up heating elements installed in the calorifiers, when and if necessary. This 30-square-metre Thermomax system has the potential of yielding the equivalent of nearly 44,000 kWh per year in the heating of domestic water. Mr, Aquilina continued: "In economic terms, the new system runs on that 44,000 kWh output with a commercial rate value of Lm1,848 per year at an electricity rate of 4c2 per unit. That's a big saving on our old water heating system costs - and cleaner too".