Heat recovery — turn waste into operating savings

Anywhere there is a continuous reject-heat stream and a coincident heating demand on the same site. The strongest cases we see are buildings with large server-room loads (the GROUPE MACH commercial tower cut gas consumption 80% on a server-room-heat retrofit), facilities with constant process or refrigeration loads, and ventilation systems where a 90%-effective ERV / HRV pays back quickly. The first step is a heat-source inventory — that tells you which streams are worth the capital.

It depends on the heat-source quality and the host sector. The ÉcoPerformance Implementation grant is sized to cap the post-grant simple payback at 5 years for institutional sites, 3 years for commercial, 2 years for industrial small/medium consumers, and 1 year for industrial large consumers. We model the unfunded and grant-funded paybacks side by side before any commitment — heat recovery is one of the measures where the grant routinely makes the math work.

Yes — most of our heat-recovery work is retrofit. The GROUPE MACH project is the proof: limited technical space alongside four existing chillers, two water towers, an indoor pool, and four boilers; main mechanical room 300 feet above ground with no craning option; critical server-room operations maintained without interruption; work performed at full occupancy. The discipline is in the staging plan — not in whether it can be done.

Heat recovery is named explicitly in the ÉcoPerformance eligible-measure list — both as an energy-consumption measure and as process improvement on industrial sites. ÉcoPerformance pays the lowest of (i) 75% of eligible cost, (ii) the per-tonne rate ($125 small/medium, $40 large, $50 large with ISO 50001), or (iii) the payback-cap formula. Énergir co-funds gas-displacement scope, and the joint Énergir / Hydro-Québec / Transition Énergétique Québec dual-energy program can finance up to 80% of cost surcharges. We stack them in the same application.

Recovery only works if the control sequences let it work. On the GROUPE MACH retrofit we paired the new heat pumps with a controls optimization — setpoint adjustment, reassessment of water-system temperature ranges, recalibration of occupancy zones, VFDs on floor ventilation — so the recovery ran every shoulder hour, not just on design days. The same Energy-division-plus-Kolostat team handles the BMS programming, the mechanical integration, and the commissioning. One contract, unified responsibility.

Against a documented baseline. We pull at least twelve months of utility and BMS data before any retrofit work starts, define the measurement boundary, and meter the recovered-heat streams. After commissioning, the dashboards reconcile recovered energy and avoided gas / electricity against that baseline — that's how the GROUPE MACH project reported 80% gas reduction, 550 tCO₂eq avoided, and a 0.25 GJ/m² intensity drop in year one. The same numbers satisfy program reporting under ÉcoPerformance.