Creative Innovation in Exmouth leads the way.
Today’s energy crisis has made many outlets – swimming pools included – reconsider their costs and forced closure or reduced opening hours to save money.
We have now seen over 200 pools across the UK open later or shut earlier on some days to save heat and light. Up to 79% of centres report they could face closure. This is continuing until beyond Easter.
In contrast, in their bid to save costs, the French have taken steps to reduce pool temperature by one degree Celsius and turn off hot water use in Public Toilets.
But read this –
One pool in Devon is leading innovation to overcome these concerns.
Exmouth Leisure Centre has a 25 m pool that is a little different. It is now heated by 12 working computer megaservers; an on-site data centre is saving its heat energy as a resource for the pool. This heat is channelled to heat the pool, cutting over £20,000 a year off energy bills. As a consequence, the gas needed to heat the pool is now less than 40% of the normal requirement.
The company behind this idea, Deep Green, suggest they have a further 7 sites to develop as “digital furnaces”. All kinds of places like bakeries and homes could benefit. And then there are more pools across the country too.
The deal is an exchange – Exmouth pool houses the data centre, in exchange for effectively free heating . To achieve this end, the computers servers are encased in mineral oil which absorbs the heat from the processors. A heat exchanger can then transfer the heat energy to the pool. Generally, heat from running computers is just wasted.
The Chief Executive of Exmouth Leisure, Peter Gilpin, has explained how the project works – on the one hand Companies benefit from data storage and handling and on the other, Exmouth pool gets warmer with the heat recapture. Peter calls it a “digital boiler”.[/vc_column_text]
A similar idea is already in use on a much larger scale by Amazon just outside Dublin. Heat from their centre is piped into the city helping to heat 50,000 sq m of buildings and up to 135 apartments.
However the smaller scale of the little Exmouth pool could provide a more useful solution idea for local town centres across the country to think outside the box and save energy and their carbon footprint. Good old Devon.
