In Anzegem they heat houses with drinking water

By 2050, the 13 municipalities of the intermunicipal company want to be an energy-neutral region. Gas-free neighborhoods are an important step in this.

With the support of the European LECSEA project, a special heat network will be installed at De Voerman that will provide about thirty homes and a number of SMEs with heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. The most special thing about this project is that the heat and cooling are obtained from the main drinking water pipeline of De Watergroep that passes the site. “Via a heat exchanger, about 4 degrees of heat or cold can be extracted from the flowing drinking water,” says Bert De Winter, Director of Innovation at De Watergroep.

Heat pumps and solar panels

That amount of heat is apparently sufficient. “The owner must provide a heat pump for each house or SME. These pumps serve as a booster to further heat up the water to the desired temperature for use as sanitary hot water and for heating the buildings. The boosters are ideally driven by renewable electricity from solar panels, for example.”

The technique can currently only be used near a main pipeline with a sufficiently large flow rate.