MOA Heat Recovery Chiller

MOA Heat Recovery Chiller

The Museum of Anthropology is two-storey, 11 000 square meter facility renowned for its displays of world arts and cultures, in particular works by First Nation band governments.  The Museum is one of UBC’s main tourist attractions and hosts a wide range of collections and cultural belongings from across Canada, as well as research laboratories for studying the collections.

Because the museum houses many sensitive items, it has strict climate control requirements. Tight humidity control in particular means that there is a year-round demand for both heating and cooling in the building.

In 2018, Energy and Water Services installed a heat recovery chiller in the building. This chiller provides a much higher lift on the condenser side than a conventional chiller, which means that energy normally rejected to atmosphere can instead be recovered and used to supplement the building’s conventional heating systems. This new chiller also provides cooling redundancy to the building, which had previously been lacking.

To date, the heat recovery chiller has recovered 1800 GJ of heat and is expected to lower the heating EUI of MOA by 183 kWh/m2/yr.

Image of the HRC installation in progress