A new municipality hall for Halle-Zoersel

Goal

The municipality of Zoersel is building a new village hall in one of its suburbs. This new village hall borders a historic public building: ‘The Pastorium’. Due to the integration of this historic building into the construction of the new village hall and the simultaneous renovation of this historic building,

Zoersel wants to create a sustainable complex, by combining a heat pump with an ice buffer, solar collectors and solar roof tiles.

Description

The intention of Zoersel is to reduce energy consumption/CO2 -emissions from this historic building. Today however, with the techniques currently available, it is not easy to collect solar power on a historically valuable building without visual impact, affecting it’s heritage value. Together with the other partners and extra funds Zoersel hopes to complete this project by using innovative solar thermic roof tiles, to be a source of inspiration for other municipalities (cross-border) and to contribute to the further development of solar energy use.

The pastorium will be equipped with solar roof tiles, to collect solar heat. The solar collectors on the new village hall also collect solar heat. The combination of both solar collectors and an ice water buffer system will serve as source for a water-to-water heat pump. The control system of the heat pump will automatically choose the optimum source for hot water production to supply low temperature heat release.

Key figures

Location: Halle Zoersel, Belgium

Heat pump: 2 units of 17.4kW each

Thermal solar collectors

20 panels SLK-F 3.0 x 1.0
5 panels: absorption surface: 53m².

Ice buffer vessels: capacity 6 x 10.000L.

Buffer tank hot water: 750 L

Current status

The system is operational since September 2022.

On saturday October 1st 2022 the building was inaugurated. More than 250 citizens visited the new building with the technical installations.

Monitoring was started. So there will be still some time for monitoring the installation (project Solarise finishes in March 2023).

Attention points / lessons learned

– (sub) Contractors are clearly not familiar with new / more specialized techniques, so a good cooperation with the supplier is necessary.

– There are not (yet) many suppliers of these techniques (like an ice buffer system coupled with a heat pump). This lack of competition has an influence on the price.

– The solar collectors are a standard product, so limited adjusting option are available. Panels also have a large delivery time.

– Ice buffer vessels take up more surface area than originally thought.