July 2005, Gardnerville, Nevada

Located in Minden Nevada, the Carson Valley Swim Center is a community swim center. The swim center consists of six pools of various sizes and temperatures. The swim center installed a solar thermal system over 18 years ago. Sustainable Energy Solutions was hired to perform an energy assessment to identify energy savings opportunities. The report identified several areas of opportunities, one of which was making some modifications to their current solar system. These modifications were modeled by SES's Project Engineer Mike Matheus using the powerful energy modeling software TRNSYS. Mike, one of only a few on the west coast capable of using TRNSYS, was able to run several "what if" scenarios using the TRNSYS model. "By using this software, I can see the impacts of control decisions, and different equipment selections on the annual energy usage, this allows me to maximize savings in a very realistic environment." Mike used this model to achieve an annual natural gas savings of 12%. "As the model evolved it became obvious that some of the control logic used was wrong and the older style heat exchangers were limiting the maximum energy transfer. I played with some brazed plate heat exchangers and tweaked the logic until I had optimized the system." The actual results achieved through the installation of 2 small brazed plate heat exchangers and redoing the controls matched the predicted results of the model to within 5%.

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