The council-owned pool in St Martin’s Avenue, which is run by Halo Leisure, was flooded in October 2019. The electricity supply was damaged which led to the on-site water pumps failing.

The site has remained closed while insurance funded works take place to reinstate it.

But some £505,000 was needed to spend on extra works, which are not covered by the insurance claim. One area that needed attention was the leisure pool ventilation unit which was an old full fresh air system that had never work well

The existing system consisted of a supply air handling unit with silencers, heating coil, filters and large industrial centrifugal fan, the unusual aspect of this was that it was 8 m tall. The extract air handling unit was in the same area, and an attempt had been made to recover some of the heat in the exhaust air with a run-around system, but this wasn’t working

Recotherm were asked to come up with a replacement unit, and being Recotherm this meant it had to be energy efficient

Recotherm engineers spent a lot of time trying different configurations to get heat recovery into the system, whilst still maintaining the existing positions for the inlet and outlets. The simple solution would have been to use a run-around coil system like the existing, but the efficiency of those systems is limited, we also needed to incorporate recirculation so that we had a degree of control over the humidity. It took a lot of effort and a great deal of “out of the box thinking” but we came up with a solution.

We now had a design that worked and an order to proceed, but the first problem we had to deal with was ‘how do we get the old unit out of there?

Being 20 years old it was solidly built with a welded steel frame, but the main problem was the height. As with every project our first priority was safety, so we installed scaffolding around the unit and starting from the top slowly took the unit apart using reciprocating saws and hard work.

We then brought the new unit on site in flat pack form and began construction from the new steel table, which had been installed to take the weight of the unit. The whole project took 4 weeks, but the end result speaks for itself with an energy efficient, state of the art, swimming pool air handling unit incorporating controlled fresh air and heat recovery via a plate heat exchanger with EC speed-controlled fans.

The council should see considerable savings in the running cost, but also much better conditions in the pool hall with the humidity now under control. It was a challenging project, but we are pleased with the results