Teeing up a heat pump retrofit at The Oxfordshire Golf Hotel & Spa

The Oxfordshire golf resort is investing £700,000 in a major services retrofit, including a solar array, that will see heat pumps replace oil-fired boilers and potentially deliver sufficient energy and resource savings to boost annual profits by up to 30%. Alex Smith looks at how the challenges were addressed

Case study: Cambridge Central Mosque

Cambridge’s elegant new mosque has comfort and sustainability at its heart thanks to the involvement of the environmental engineer at the project’s inception. Andy Pearson looks at how Skelly & Couch’s creative design worked with the grand scale of the prayer hall to provide natural ventilation and daylighting for more than 1,000 worshippers

Opening the loop – CP3 guide

Open-loop groundwater source heat pumps are poorly understood and little used in the UK. A new code of practice, CP3, aims to raise standards, say Phil Jones and Bean Beanland

Electrocaloric cooling – making a difference

Electrocaloric cooling works by applying an electric field to change temperatures and requires no refrigerants. Metkel Yebiyo and Professor Andy Ford look at the benefits of the technology and the challenges of bringing it to market

Force of nature – naturally ventilating Amsterdam’s Breeze Hotel

The 11-storey Breeze Hotel in Amsterdam has a unique natural ventilation system that uses solar chimneys and water droplets sprayed into a shaft to move air around the building. Andy Pearson speaks to the academic behind the concept, Dr Ben Bronsema, and looks  at how his ‘earth, wind and fire’ theory became reality

The impact on system design

As older systems come to the end of their life, they are progressively being replaced with alternatives that use lower GWP refrigerants. Martin Passingham, product manager for DX at Daikin UK, looks at what this means for the design of existing systems

Recovery, recycling and reuse

Significantly reducing the demand for imported higher-GWP refrigerants before the next quota reduction in 2021 will be key to avoiding many supply and price issues experienced since late 2017, says Daikin’s Martin Passingham