Harnessing the power of wastewater heat recovery is the prime way to significantly reduce your building’s energy footprint.
With the help of the Ecowec hybrid exchanger, housing associations and residents are now able to utilize part of the waste water thermal energy produced inside the property, of which 20–95% can be recovered.
Wastewater heat recovery can cut the property’s consumption peaks and thus equalize the energy plants’ load peaks.
Wastewater heat recovery is the most cost-effective way to reduce a building’s energy consumption. Approximately 30% of an apartment building’s annual heating energy consumption goes to heating domestic water and subsequently down the drain. In energy-efficient A-class buildings, the energy contained in the domestic water accounts for over 50% of the heat balance. It is possible to recover thermal energy from wastewater led to the sewer and reuse it with the Ecowec hybrid exchanger. The building’s total energy consumption can be significantly reduced by recovering heat from wastewater.
Heat Balance in Apartment Buildings Finns use about 155 liters of water per day, of which about 40% is hot domestic water. On average, about 20-50% of the total energy consumption of residential buildings goes down the drain, but this percentage will increase in the future due to energy renovations of older buildings. With the relative amount of heat energy contained in wastewater increasing, site-specific wastewater heat recovery is becoming part of energy and cost-efficient construction, which can very effectively reduce both construction costs and building operating energy costs.
Heat energy from treated wastewater has previously only been recoverable on a centralized basis at municipal wastewater treatment plants and used as part of district heating production, which has also made district heating even more ecological. Now, the heat energy from wastewater can also be recovered on a property-specific basis, without the need to first purify the wastewater. At the same time, the loss of heat energy contained in sewer waters in municipal sewer networks outside buildings is also reduced.