Rooftop swimming pool heating in Perth, WA

Bowman and Rinnai provide the perfect heating solution for an Australian roof top pool - where winter temperatures can be surprisingly cool!

A Bowman heat exchanger linked to 6 Rinnai water heaters, is providing the perfect heating solution for a relatively new 150 m³ swimming pool installation on level 3 of a large corporate headquarters in Perth, Western Australia.

Replacing an older style atmospheric gas pool heater, the 290 kW natural gas heating system, designed and supplied by Hi-Tech Pacific A’Asia, one of Bowman’s Australian distributors, comprises 6 x Rinnai HD28 commercial water heaters coupled to a manifolded power flue system, providing hot water at 75 °C to the single Bowman FG160-5115-5T titanium heat exchanger, by way of a novel water inlet and return pipework circuit.

With the Rinnai water heaters, each providing relatively low hot water flow rates, they are particularly efficient, especially for heating a single water circuit and when several units are manifolded together, they provide an extremely cost-effective heating solution, compared to a traditional, large single boiler. This combination also allows individual water heater units to be shut down for service or maintenance, so the pool can still be heated and available, without any interruptions to pool users.

Bowman heat exchangers are especially suitable for use with multiple Rinnai boiler installations due to their high water flow rates and have been specified for similar applications worldwide.

The FG160-5115-5T unit features a titanium tube core and is designed for use with pools up to 320 m³. When operating with 82 °C boiler water, it transfers up to 354 kW of heat energy into the pool water, based on a hot flow rate of 160 l/min, and a pool water flow rate of 650 l/min at 28 °C.

In this particular instance, heat transfer performance was an important factor. As the pool is located on the south side of the building, it is exposed to the prevailing winter winds and, with very low levels of sunshine during winter months, air temperatures can drop to a very cool 10 °C, and below!

Hi-Tech Pacific A’Asia’s designed pool heating systems have proven to be extremely effective all-year-round solutions for commercial swimming pools of all shapes and sizes Australia-wide for the past 15 years and what was a potentially challenging application in this particular instance, due to the positioning and orientation of the pool, will now be reliably heated all year round to provide comfortable swimming conditions for the corporate employees.

Installation of this system was provided by Poolwerx Perth City.