Foothills County: Scott Seaman Sports Rink Ice Plant Heat Recovery 

Overview 

As part of the Action Centre’s Recreation Energy Conservation Program, Foothills County completed multiple retrofits at the Scott Seaman Sports Rink. The retrofit involved installing a refrigeration plant heat recovery system, building automation system, and pump VFDs.  

The project was commissioned in December 2022. 

Approach 

The Scott Seaman Sports Rink is a multi-purpose recreational facility constructed in 2013. The facility consists of a single ice sheet with some stand seating, a walking track, two multipurpose rooms, a lobby with a concession stand, changing rooms and washrooms. The building is mainly heated by natural gas burners in the rooftop units and the over stands heaters. There is electric heating for stairwells and some bathrooms in the facility by wall electric heaters and baseboards. Cooling is provided to some of the zones by the rooftop units with the cooling for the ice sheet performed by the ammonia refrigeration plant.  

The ice plant heat recovery project recovers waste heat from the ice plant for space heating and water heating. This limits the amount of gas heating required and creates a more efficient system. Prior to this project, the waste heat from the ice plant was vented to the atmosphere.   

In addition to the ice plant heat recovery system, Foothills County also installed a new Building Automation System (BAS) to control the energy consuming systems within the facility to ensure they are optimized to the operation schedule of the building and to achieve high energy performance. Variable Frequency Drives (VFD) have also been installed on select electric motors to align the speed of the pumps and blowers to the required load. 

Results 

The replacement resulted in a reduction of 179 tCO₂/year and energy cost savings of $24,672.74/year. The project resulted in a 43% GHG reduction from the existing system and a 25% reduction facility-wide compared to the baseline. 

We at Foothills County are doing our best to identify and implement efficiency measures that will help reduce GHG emissions from our facilities and operations and save valuable public dollars. These newly completed projects are only a few of the many projects we have identified to help us achieve our efficiency goals and we thank the MCCAC for providing a substantial portion of funding to complete them.

Delilah Miller, Reeve