New wastewater heat recovery system in the United Kingdom and the European Union launched

The PIRANHA from SHARC Energy is a compact wastewater heat recovery system that offers both a strong commercial opportunity and reliable, renewable heat to medium sized businesses and premises, and sits alongside their larger SHARC systems.

“I am confident that with the addition of PIRANHA to our offerings will be a key revenue driver and marks an important milestone in our sales and deployment strategy that will strengthen our first to market advantage in the UK and EU,” said SHARC Group Chief Operating Officer (UK) Russell Burton. “The PIRANHA represents a significant milestone for the SHARC technology in our market.”

SHARC Energy has built a reputation on ground-breaking technology that effectively recovers heat from the waste water that we flush down the drains every day. An almost limitless resource that is typically discarded without a second thought but can provide a very significant proportion of the heat required for a large business, a swimming pool complex or a district heat network.

SHARC systems are in action right across the world but, in Europe, have so far been limited to larger installations. With the European launch of SHARC’s compact PIRANHA system, sewage and wastewater heat recovery becomes available to a much wider range of premises. PIRANHA is a self-contained system that intercepts wastewater and extracts the heat using a unique heat exchanger and uses an in-built heat pump to return hot water to the building at around 60ºC. PIRANHA is quiet and highly efficient, with a typical Co-efficient of Performance (CoP) of around five.

A PIRANHA, typically, can recover heat for hotels, nursing homes, student accommodation or apartment blocks.

Case study: Lake Louise Inn, Banff
One of the earliest installations was at the Lake Louise Inn in Banff, Canada, which nestles within the Banff National Park, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Lake Louise Inn has nearly 200 rooms across eleven different types, some of which include hot tubs, and there is an indoor swimming pool. There is also a very busy laundry room. Lake Louise Inn uses a significant amount of energy to heat all the water they need for all their facilities and, until recently and just like virtually every other hotel in the world, all that energy was poured down the drain and wasted.

A PIRANHA T10 unit was commissioned in September 2018, and during a data gathering exercise over the first two weeks of October 2018 ran for an average of 12 hours per day, producing a daily heat output of 1.5 million BTU, the equivalent of heating nearly 10,000 litres (6,000 US gallons) of water from 10ºC to 60ºC (50 – 140ºF). Lake Louise Inn’s laundry room is propane heated, and over a 52-week period the PIRANHA system will reduce their propane requirement by 30,000 litres (6,667 gallons), and the equivalent of 80 tonnes of CO2 reduction.

Across North America and Europe alone over 330 billion litres of wastewater is discharged daily. This wastewater has the potential to replace over 1.5 billion MWhr of natural gas consumption used for space and water heating.