A forest holiday village which prides itself on its green credentials has been equipped with open vented thermal stores from Gledhill the cylinder specialist to provide guests with heating and hot water fuelled by bio-mass boilers.
The new Forest Holidays location at Blackwood Forest in Hampshire offers the chance to relax in one of 60 luxury woodland cabins hidden deep in a 270 hectare beech forest.
Each of the 1, 2, 3 and 4 bedroom cabins is equipped with a Torrent GreenHeat unit, fuelled by a pellet-fed biomass boiler located in an external enclosure, with each boiler feeding into two properties.
The boilers are designed to ‘carbon neutrally’ convert biomass wood pellets into heat while giving off almost no wood smoke. The carbon dioxide released by burning is balanced by that absorbed by the tree during its growth, while the mineral-rich ash from the Wood Pellet Fuel is recycled to fertilise the forest.
Forest Holidays are members of the Green Tourism Business Scheme, and environmentally friendly initiatives, include having “green champions” on-site, creating bug hotels and bat boxes, and installing daylight sensors on our external lights.
Sinclair Heating director Phil Rank organised the installation at Blackwood Forest and worked with the build and design team on selection of the heating system.
He explained: “We looked at a number of systems but decided on the GreenHeat unit because it was a high performance thermal store that could supply heating and hot water. Importantly, Gledhill’s unique manufacturing service at depots across the country enabled us to specify the addition of two 3 kW electric heating units on each store so that if there was at any time an issue with the boiler system, they could still provide both heating and hot water as a self-contained back-up system.
“Forest Holiday Villages are hugely successful and enjoy high occupancy levels so it is vital that heating and hot water is always available.”
Phil added: “The fact that there is no requirement for discharge pipe work - removing the need for G3 - was another advantage in speeding up the installation process.”
Phil and his team used the electric heating back-up to heat the properties during the fitting out stages, before the boilers were installed, and found the Torrent GreehHeat units performed well even during the arctic spell of cold winter early in the year.
The cabins are designed by award winning architects Holder Matthias to BREEAM specifications, and benefit from the latest eco-sensitive thinking. The single storey 1-3 bed cabins are timber frame construction and benefit from advanced insulation and double glazing which means very little heat loss. All have underfloor heating and the 4-bedroom cabins have additional radiators heating the upper floor. The primary store circulates water directly through radiators and underfloor heating, and is hugely efficient.
Mains pressure hot water is delivered via the plate heat exchanger linked to the primary store. That means domestic hot water for taps and showers is not stored water but instantaneously heated mains cold water, eliminating any risk of legionella contamination.
Torrent’s patented hot water control system monitors the temperature of the water and modulates the pump to control the output of the heat exchanger, ensuring safe water temperatures with no risk of scalding.
GreenHeat thermal stores are manufactured at Gledhill’s 12 depots across the UK with the tappings and features specified by the installer to provide almost a bespoke service for each unit. They are supplied exclusively through plumbers’ merchants, Torrent GreenHeat has been developed as the perfect partner for uncontrolled heat sources such as wood chip burners or log burning stoves because it is open vented.
The design of the unit enables the use of other economical green energy sources such as biomass boilers, solar thermal, and heat pumps alongside oil or LPG to deliver superbly flexible and efficient heating and hot water.
Importantly, the Torrent GreenHeat system uses the fossil fuel heat source only as a last resort, automatically prioritising renewable energy as the principal heat source.
