Charlestown Centre - Finglas
With the Ballymun regeneration programme now in full swing, the Charlestown Centre in Finglas, Irelands newest and most exclusive shopping and apartment complex, makes an impressive addition to the Dublin skyline.
Located at the Finglas junction, behind Joe Duffey Motors, the centre offers 280 apartments spread over four five-storey blocks and one 12 storey tower plus numerous stores including Dunnes Stores (7,000 sq m), Carphone Warehouse and Lifestyle Sports.
Bovale, the developers, has been one of the first developers to incorporate many sustainable energy saving features into both the shopping centre and residential units with the intention of reducing energy costs and carbon dioxide emissions.
As part of this programme, a combined heat and power plant has been built at basement level, which uses Irish sourced wood pellets as well as gas. The pellets are zero rated for Kyoto Protocol carbon emissions, given that it is recycled carbon from Irish woods.
Installed alongside the CHP plant and wood pellet boiler, Hevac provided two of the Chappee Arizona range of steel monobloc boilers complete with matched Riello fully modulating burners. The output of each of these boilers is 1200 kW.
Working closely with Hochtief Facilities Management, VMRA Consulting Engineers and Jones Engineering, the brief was to dispense with the need for individual boilers in each apartment and be able to provide a unit that metered the energy entering the apartment from the district heating system. Coupled to this, the developer requested that hot water storage be available in each dwelling.
Hevac were able to offer a tailored solution to the problem of providing both metered heating and zone control for each apartment.
The solution came from our supplier, Watts Industries Italy, who created a unit called the Bologna.
The unit incorporated primary flow and return connections on the Landlord side, two electrothermic actuators connected to thermostats within the apartment and on the hot water cylinder and a heat meter that measures volumetric flow and temperature differential.
The unit proved the ideal solution to the designers requirements, with a depth of only 100mm it was easy to install it within the tight service spaces outside each apartment.
Of course, metering the apartments is only half the job, the data needs to be collected and billed. Hevac installed 2 data collectors plus modem into the main comms room of the site. These units communicate with all 280 heat meters, downloads 14 pieces of information from each, formulates this information into an excel spread sheet and allows the managing agent then to accurately bill each tenant.
