Centrally located in the grounds of Ely Cathedral, Cambridgeshire, The Almonry Kitchen is a beautiful café and event space set within a 13th-century Grade I listed building. Its rich history and stunning architecture offers customers a truly unique dining experience.
Renovation to ensure the best of the past, present and future
With only 2.5% of all listed buildings in England and Wales designated Grade 1, this listing is restricted to structures of exceptional interest and national importance and are subject to the strictest controls for any alterations. Recent renovations to both decarbonise The Almonry Kitchen within the cathedral and to enhance its interiors therefore had to go through a rigorous approval procedure and be carried out under the strictest of controls.
Ely Cathedral secured a grant for this work, which included replacing the old gas boiler in The Almonry Kitchen with an Ideal Heating Commercial ECOMOD 290HT 27kW monobloc air source heat pump.
The heat pump is now providing heating and domestic hot water for The Almonry.
Read the full case study here: Ideal Commercial Heating Ely Cathedral The Almonry Tea Room Case Study
ECOMOD 290HT commercial heat pumps for efficiency
As with all air source heat pumps, the ECOMOD 290HT utilises the free energy in the air (even when air temperature is as low as -20⁰C), the heat of which is captured via a refrigerant and transferred to the heating and hot water system through a heat exchanger.
As heat is transferred rather than generated, heat pumps can operate up to four times more efficiently than boilers and have a much smaller carbon footprint for heat generation. That’s primarily because heat pumps do not operate by combustion.
They do use electricity to power the transfer of heat from the environment to the building, but it’s a very small amount.
The ECOMOD 290HT installed at The Almonry is able to achieve high temperatures up to 75°C, comes with a high efficiency rating and high Coefficient of Performance (CoP) rating of up to 4.94. It has been designed and built with an inverter-controlled compressor to accurately match the heat demand based, further enhancing the efficiency of the café’s heating system.
The ECOMOD 290HT at The Almonry has been commissioned by Ideal Heating engineers as part of our free commissioning service, which has been in place since 2018 and is available across the full range of Ideal Heating Commercial heat pumps and condensing boilers. It not only ensures the appliance has been installed, configured and set up correctly, but also automatically applies a five-year warranty at no extra cost.
ECOMOD 290HT heat pumps: the low carbon solution
The refrigerant used within a heat pump to absorb heat from the air is allocated a Global Warming Potential (GWP) figure which indicates its climate impact; the lower the GWP, the lower the contribution to climate change.
Synthetic and natural refrigerants are all readily available, but the latter has, by far, the lowest GWP. In the case of our ECOMOD 290HT heat pump, it’s GWP is just three.
For The Almonry Kitchen, the combination of efficiency and low GWP has meant the ECOMOD 290HT heat pump is readily able to provide the heat required whilst also decarbonising the heating and DHW system.
To find out more about our commercial heat pumps visit: Commercial Heat Pumps
