Thermal Creek worked with Synergy Projects to install the geothermal ground loop heat exchanger as part of the newly constructed Grace Village project for the Salvation Army.
The Grace Village Housing Project is a 175 unit residential development in Edmonton’s Castle Downs neighborhood. It is the Salvation Army’s facility for transitional housing and other associated programs. The entire project was completed in 2023.
It is truly a marvelous facility. We were proud, but also a bit humbled to be part of building a facility that will help so many of our vulnerable people in our community.
The geothermal ground loop field consists of 40 geothermal vertical closed loop boreholes drilled to 492ft deep each. A total of 5 headers were constructed to optimize the fluid flow between the boreholes.
The geothermal is set up as a decentralized system. This means that the ground loop is essentially extended throughout the building.
A total of 106 NORDIC geothermal water-to-air ceiling mounted heat pumps deliver the heating and cooling to the different areas in the building.
The start of the project was “interesting”…
As we started drilling, we encountered heavy metal objects at around 50ft depth. Our drilling rigs were bouncing all over the place!
It turned out, and nobody was aware of this, that a long time ago, the area was used as a dumping ground for farm equipment.
We ended up ‘piloting’ all the borehole locations and subsequently using a Dual Rotary style drilling rig to get through some of these obstacles.
