UBC Okanagan Science Building Heat Recovery

The 100,000ft2 Science Facility at the University of British Columbia Okanagan Campus is a general chemistry teaching and research facility and the building suffered from high heating energy costs due to the approximately 90,000 CFM of continuous ventilation air requirements for the laboratories and teaching spaces throughout its three levels.

A complete energy analysis of the facility’s laboratory exhaust air and makeup air requirements was conducted to determine the business case for adding a glycol runaround heat recovery system that was coupled between the laboratory manifold exhaust system and the outside air intake of the building’s main makeup air HVAC system.

CURA provided a complete and integrated consulting team of Prime Consulting, Mechanical Engineering, Architect, Structural Engineering and Electrical Engineering and also provided significant pre-order engineering support to fast-track the procurement of major equipment with long lead times to ensure that the entire project including construction work could be completed within a single fiscal year, and before the winter months.

Concurrently, UBC Okanagan also performed upgrades to reduce overall occupied and unoccupied air change rates to all laboratory and teaching areas to reduce overall building ventilation demand and heating energy usage.

Post-commissioning support was also provided by CURA to ensure that the modeled/targeted heat recovery, paybacks and overall project goals were being realized.

The heat recovery system’s effectiveness was enhanced further in 2020/2021 during the replacement of main HVAC supply fans that allowed the Science heat recovery system to harvest more energy from the exhaust air and transfer it to the outside air intakes for the facility.

Please contact us if you require expertise in developing energy upgrade and low carbon solutions for managing HVAC energy usage.