Assessment of factors influencing the energy and water performance of aquatic centres

Aquatic centres are unlike any other type of buildings in terms of energy and water consumption. Aquatic centres can expend around seven times more energy for every square metre of building area compared to an average commercial office building and consume as much as 1,000 million litres of water each year. There has been insufficient research that examines the energy performance and water usage of aquatic centres worldwide compared to other types of buildings. Also, there are very limited studies that modelled an entire aquatic centre that has multiple indoor pools within a pool hall. The main difficulty is to model the interaction of water evaporation with the mechanical equipment which is not able to be controlled by most of the energy modelling software. Using the indoor swimming pool module integrated into the surface heat balance procedures in EnergyPlus 8.7, this paper investigates the factors that influence the energy and water performance of an aquatic centre in Victoria, Australia. Detailed information about the building envelope, electromechanical systems and operational data have been obtained from the aquatic centre. The model is calibrated against measured energy and water data (utility bills obtained from the aquatic centre). Parametric studies of several energy and water efficient features are undertaken. The simulation results revealed that the incorporation of solar pool-heating systems resulted in 15.4% energy reduction and the use of vacuum filters for backwash water usage resulted in 20% water reduction. Through creating detailed procedures and processes, this paper demonstrates that an aquatic centre can be modelled successfully despite its noted complexity.