Existing Solar Projects in NS
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Halifax County, NS

Quinpool Rd, Halifax

Keywords: active, dhw, water panels, apartment bldg, commercial

Size:
sq ft, 0 baths, 0 bedrooms.
Energy Percents:
% passive, % active, % external
External Sources:
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Description

Quinpool Towers (Quingate), owned by Quinhall Investments Ltd., is a 232-unit apartment building constructed in 1978 as part of the Quinpool Centre Complex in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The building, which houses approximately 500 occupants, is of poured concrete construction, has 10 storeys and has a flat concrete slab roof. The exterior of the building is metal clad.

The building has one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments and two bachelor suites. The space-heating distribution system is baseboard hot water. Service hot water is delivered through a circulating hot-water piping system supplied from hot-water storage and boilers in the mechanical room on the building's roof.

Choosing Solar Heating

In 1986, Alpha Energy approached Derek Devison, Quinpool Towers' building manager, to consider the installation of a solar heating system for the building. Mr. Devison and the building's owners were attracted to the solar option for the following reasons:

Commercial oil prices in 1987 were fairly high ($0.33 per litre)

. Some of the building's hot-water storage tanks needed to be replaced.

Alpha Energy offered a unique leasing arrangement that tied the lease payments to the price of oil.

The Government of Canada offered a 50-percent rebate of the capital cost of the solar hot-water system.

A system designed to preheat service hot water for the building was installed in 1987.

The Solar Hot-Water System

The solar hot-water system was designed to preheat the cold water supplied to the oil-fired domestic water-heating system. Under a contract from Alpha Energy, Thermo Dynamics Ltd. of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, designed and installed the system described in Table 1. Figure 1 shows a schematic of the system. The solar collector array consists of one hundred 2.3-m2 flat-plate collectors, rack-mounted in two rows of 50 collectors. The rows were mounted on Unistrut® galvanized steel channels and have a gross area of 228 m2. The collectors were set at a 45° angle and installed on the building's roof, facing due south.


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