Edenview Kelvin Grove

The Problem:

Edenview Apartments, a 64 lot residential community in Kelvin Grove needed to upgrade their end of life Gas centralised hot water plant that provides over 1.6 million litres of hot water for the residents per year.

Existing Gas Hot Water Plant:

2 x natural gas Rheem Raypak Boilers

  • Burning at approx..80% efficiency and consuming 593,125 MJ per year
  • 78 tonnes CO2 produced per year

The Body Corporate’s main priorities were:

  • The BC did not want the responsibility of owning, operating or maintaining the plant.
  • They want to challenge the status quo by installing less carbon intense water heating solution.
  • Whilst adopting a more sustainable water heating solution and reducing their carbon footprint they didn’t want to increase the community’s cost for hot water.

The Solution:

LPE’s new efficient electric Hot Water plant:

  • 2 x Rheem Commercial Heat Pumps (Primary heat source)
  • 10 storage tanks each with a heating element (Secondary heat source for boost or redundancy)
  • System electricity consumption of 39,620kWh per year
  • Solar PV system consisting of 38 panels
  • Solar PV produces 26,505kWh per annum of clean renewable electricity providing approximately 60% of the electricity consumed for heating water.
  • 20 tonnes of CO2 produced per year
  • Reduction of 23.57 tonnes of CO2 per year or 65.9%

The existing hot water plant area could be re-utilised to install the new efficient hot water system, and the building had ample suitable roof space for a solar PV system to supply the clean renewable electricity to run the already highly efficient commercial electric heat pump solution.

The Outcome:

Solution benefits:

  • Community no longer relies on gas which is a non-renewable fossil fuel energy source to provide the community’s hot water.
  • Moved to a reliable, highly efficient electricity-based heat pump water heating solution.
  • Solar PV system installed to provide the clean renewable electricity to off-set up to 70% of the energy usage of the new efficient hot water system.
  • The cost of electricity generated by the solar PV system remains very stable for the entire 10 year contract term, further protecting the community from future hot water price increases if they were to stay exposed to gas pricing or 100% grid electricity prices.
  • Hot Water system’s carbon footprint reduced significantly.
  • As Australia’s grid electricity incorporates more and more renewable electricity generation the community’s carbon footprint will be reduced even more – not achievable with gas.
  • Cost of hot water for all residents reduced compared to the gas based system.
  • Solution fully funded, installed and maintained by LPE – providing great peace of mind to the community.
  • Installation of the new solution was fully planned and co-ordinated with the community for a seamless change-over with only a small hot water outage on one day.