Redland City Council (RCC) is the local government authority for the Redlands catchment, which includes the Southern Moreton Bay Islands, North Stradbroke Island and south eastern areas of the mainland bordered by Brisbane, Gold Coast and Logan cities.
RCC has numerous public services properties and facilities including the “Administration Building”. The building was constructed in the mid 1980’s and the Air Conditioning plant and equipment that served the building had been in use for 25 years. As such the majority of the plant and equipment had reached the end of its life cycle of operation and an extensive upgrade was necessary.
- The existing plant and equipment that served the building included:
- A single dual reciprocating compressor Trane chiller with a capacity of 573kWr
- Two (2) induced draft cooling towers
- Duty and Standby chilled and condenser water pumps
- A Trane single scroll compressor chiller with a capacity of 80kWr.
The project was borne out of the fact that the main Trane chiller had become problematic, and needed to be replaced to restore reliability to the plant. It was determined that the replacement plant and equipment should be highly efficient with minimal water consumption.
As such, NDY designed an air cooled solution utilising oil free centrifugal compressors on the new chiller, and adiabatic precooling pads on the new air cooled condenser. The systems installed are providing vastly improved energy consumption. The new systems use only 10% of the water used by the previous Air Conditioning systems.
After one year of operation the RCC has announced that as a result of this upgrade, the council has been able to generate a saving in water consumption from this unit of 94.7%, this saving equates to just over 1.5 mega litres of water per annum.
To illustrate the saving – based on the Queenslands target consumption of 140 litres per day per person the Redland City Council has saved in one year the targeted water consumption of an individual for 31 years.
© Photography by Deepi Naru
