Case Studies:Bromsgrove Leisure Centre

The Bromsgrove Sport and Leisure Centre, operated by Everyone Active, is a £10.3m facility situated in the heart of Bromsgrove that offers some of the finest sports and leisure facilities in the area. The state-of-the-art building opened in late 2017 and features a six-lane, 25 metre main swimming pool as well as a 15 by 10 metre second pool with an innovative moving floor allowing for an adjustable depth.

The facility also includes a sports hall and climbing wall in addition to a 100-station gym, a fully featured spa, and a café, thereby providing a range of services not otherwise available to the local community.

As part of a wider local redevelopment project by Bromsgrove District Council, the new sports and leisure centre was built as a replacement to an adjacent facility dating from the 1970’s.  As a new build project, the building was designed to meet strict building and environmental standards.  With two swimming pools and the accompanying level of year-round heat demand, the leisure centre demanded a high-performance heating system which was designed and installed by Yorkshire Building Services Ltd (YBS).

Adveco Ltd. was contracted to supply two A.O. Smith BFC120 condensing water heaters and SST stainless steel calorifiers to serve the domestic hot water (DHW) supply and a bespoke 3000 litre MSS buffer vessel, with controls and ancillaries to serve the leisure centre’s heating system.

The combined 240kW BFC Cyclones from A.O. Smith are fully room-sealed condensing high-efficiency water heaters (97% gross). Flexible flue options allow them to be placed almost anywhere, providing numerous options for designers working on new building projects like Bromsgrove Leisure Centre. This water heater is fitted with an automatic gas/air premix burning system including burner modulation for improved efficiency. The water heaters feed to an Adveco Stainless Steel Twin-Coil (SST) calorifiers, each of which is supplied with a pair of independent internal heat exchange coils to serve the centre’s DHW system. Each high-output coil can be used with a separate heat source, enabling effective integration of renewable technologies or multiple heat sources, or as in this case are combined to increase the heat transfer capacity from a single high-output source.

Warm preheat water is also fed into the custom-built 3000 litre MSS buffer vessel, this carbon steel primary system vessels has been 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. Warm stored water was drawn from the top half to be further heated by the boiler system arrangement. This energy store then supplies heat to the building and swimming pools.

This bespoke application meets the building’s high demand for heating and hot water, while delivering a high level of energy efficiency. The added range of options to introduce new, sustainable technologies means in the future the building can drive further system efficiencies beyond the levels achievable by conventional heating appliances.