The new Alexandra House, operated by Care South, is a 2-storey, 58-room residential care and nursing home designed to offer high standards of communal accommodation for the elderly, including dementia and nursing care.  The new building, situated on the site of the previous Alexandra House, uses traditional building materials to minimise its environmental impact and incorporates special features such as themed lounges and a secure, sensory garden.

A well designed and crucially, reliable heating and hot water system is paramount to care homes, where the comfort and wellbeing of residents often requires above average levels of heating year-round.  Care homes, like all residential applications, typically exhibit a significant, but varied, hot water and heating usage pattern. In the case of Alexandra House, the most effective design was that of a boiler return preheat system.

Installed by Holton Plumbing Services Ltd., the system incorporates a custom-built Adveco MSS 2500-litre buffer vessel, as well as a cascade of two AO Smith Upsilon 110 boilers and two AO Smith IT500 indirect calorifiers. Supplied as a complete package, alongside ancillaries and backup heating components via electric immersion elements, Adveco has provided Alexandra House with a complete, bespoke heating and hot water system featuring some of the highest quality products on the UK market.

The bespoke MSS 2500-litre buffer is a carbon steel primary system vessel, carefully designed to fit any heating application that requires an inertia tank or energy storage vessel. With multiple level tappings, the MSS can be configured to be compatible with almost any heating application, supporting multiple return flow temperatures or multiple heat sources, such as renewables or low or high-grade heaters. Designed to accept preheated water, the MSS 2500 is in turn connected to the Upsilon 110 boilers and central heating system.

Easy to install, the AO Smith Upsilon UB 110 are highly efficient (up to 110.3%), very low gas usage boilers with very low emissions (Nox class 5). Fitted with an intelligent control system, the boilers’ performance is optimised through a process of infinite modulation. The UB110 are also an optimal choice for the care home setting, with built-in redundancy ensuring system operation and continuity of service.

Through the use of duplex IT500 indirect calorifiers, the system additionally provides domestic hot water. The 500 litre IT is an indirect water heater fitted with a single heat exchanger. The tank has a second-generation glass coating to prevent corrosion, replaceable magnesium anode and insulated clean out door and removable control column for comprehensive waterside maintenance and convenient servicing. Adveco also provisioned an electric immersion heater to provide a separate heat source for further system redundancy.

With a correctly sized thermal store in place Alexandra House has the option to further integrate renewables to provide the preheat, at which point the boilers need only be used to top-up the temperature or cover periods of off-peak demand while the thermal store is recharging.