Having A Common Plant Room Reduced Operation, Maintenance & Energy Costs

The Orchid Hotel, Pune is a 5-star ecotel hotel property in the western part of Pune city managed and operated by Kamat Hotels India Private Limited for the past 10 years. As a five-star hotel, it has approx. five banquet halls, 396 guest rooms, and 5 restaurants distributed in two wings OCC wing & Orchid wing. The facility has a tile façade throughout its periphery which serves as a good heat barrier for the building and helps to reduce the load on the air-conditioning system.

To meet the comfort requirements of these areas air-conditioning system was designed & installed with two separate plant rooms of 450 TR & 630 TR cooling capacity respectively, having a primary constant & secondary variable pumping system. The facility was facing several issues related to comfort and energy consumption. Since Kamat group is always keen on energy consumption part and focused on contributing to the betterment of Mother Earth when it came to notice they took a call for performance assessment of the highest consuming utility i.e. HVAC to arrest the inefficiencies and optimize the operation.

During the chiller plant During plant performance assessment, it was observed that both the chiller plants were performing at very poor efficiency.

Cooling tower performance report showed the towers were performing at poor effectiveness of 36%. Also, the AHUs were not installed with the control valves and the FCU’s two-way control valves were not working. Chilled water flow was also not balanced to the design value, many AHUs were starving for chilled water flow, hence resulting in poor AHU performance and failure in maintaining room temperature.

These inefficiencies showed an energy saving potential of 65% i.e., 2930 kWhr/day for 20 hours of plant operation, and the solutions proposed were as follows;

1. Replacement of chillers.
2. Have a common chiller plant for both wings, which reduced the number of ancillary equipment operations, maintenance, and reduced running cost.
3. Optimize the chiller plant with a holistic approach (by installing VFDs for all the ancillary equipment and flow demand controller).
4. Improving and maintaining the condenser water quality.
5. Installing control valves for all the AHUs and replacing non-operational two valves for FCUs