The new school in Northern New Brunswick was designed to accommodate students from Balmoral, Dundee, Eel River Crossing and Saint-Maure. The 66,000 sq. ft. building will accommodate 315 students in its 16 classrooms. It will also boast a music room, an arts and science room, a technology room, a cafeteria and kitchen, a resource centre, an administration centre, and an expanded gymnasium.

The community where the school is located in raised a total of $288,000 towards this $14 million project, which contributed to the increase versatility of the centre. Instead of simply building a school, the Mosaique du Nord building also functions as a gathering place for the community.

The building was designed and constructed with state of the art technologies, including geothermal heating. This building uses four W400 NORDIC® units to fulfill the heating requirements of the building year round. There are a total of 140 nominal tons installed in the school. The geothermal system is an active heating, passive cooling system. The ground loop is used to provide cooling, and the heat pumps do not operate in the cooling mode. There is a common buffer tank on the indoor side, with each of the units tied in parallel to the hot buffer tank. There is a circulator for each heat pump as well as a check valve to prevent back flow through the exchanger when the heat pump is not in use. The heating zones draw heat from the tank as required and the heat pumps operate as required to maintain the tank temperature at its set point value.

There is also a common buffer tank on the outdoor side, each of the units is tied in parallel to the cold buffer tank. There is a circulator for each heat pump as well as a check valve to prevent back flow through the exchanger when the heat pump is not in use. The cold buffer tank is connected to the ground loop and a variable speed circulator is used to provide flow from the tank to the ground loop. The cooling zones reject heat to the cold tank, the group loop is used to maintain the tank temperature at it’s set point value.

This design is highly efficient, reducing the amount of energy required to heat and cooling the building effectively. This design allowed the building to achieve LEED Silver Certification though the Canadian Green Building Coucil. The project was designed by David Foulem Architecte Inc.

For more information on this case study, and for full photos of the installation of Maritime Geothermal's NORDIC Commercial Water-to-Water heat pumps, click here.