The GreenLife building on the west side of downtown Milton is a six story development by DelRidge Homes. GreenLife buildings are Net Zero buildings (producing as much energy as they consume). Building upon the success of GreenLife main St, Green Method was awarded the contract to provide the HVAC system for the building.
The HVAC system requirement was to provide individually controlled temperature and ventilation systems for each apartment while improving upon the previous building, GreenLife Main street project.
The building consists of 148 condo units on 6 floors, each with their own individual requirement for heating, cooling and ventilation.
Further systems included a ventilation system for the underground parking lot, locker rooms and common areas. Individual Geothermal units interconnected to an outside underground heat exchanger provide the heating and cooling needs for each apartment and common areas. For ventilation, each apartment featured a dedicated HRV (Heat Recovery Ventilator) controlled from within the suite.
A special challenge was to improve upon the layout and efficiency of the pump room for the geothermal system. The new system displays a primary-secondary loop pumping system controlled with Variable Frequency Drives (VFDs).
The project took less than a year to complete, starting from system design, equipment selection, project coordination, and implementation to system commissioning and follow up. The system start-up and commissioning took several weeks as each floor was completed.
This defied the ability of the system to adapt to load changes. The capacity of the pumping system to modulate its speed, reacting to load changes, was instrumental to this approach for the commissioning process.
The condo fees are about 12 cents a square foot per suite, which is approximately one-third of what they would be for a similarly sized building constructed by conventional means.
The green method provided a two-year warranty for the installation and will maintain the system through a maintenance contract with the condo corporation.
