On Friday 25th of October myself and John Twidell journeyed over to Melton Mowbray for a guided tour back scenes of the latest J.D. Weatherspoons public house. Now Weatherspoons are hardly a local success story but the reason is that this is the UK’s first ECO pub.
Extra kudos must go to Weatherspoons as they do not normally build pubs rather just refurbish existing buildings with this being only their second new build public house.
After a brief wait for the manager to see us and a reasonably priced coffee later we started on the tour. The first thing you notice as you approach the building is the vertical axis wind turbine on the roof which is of an unusual configuration by a company called “Quiet Revolution” (www.quietrevolution.co.uk).
In the public area you might not notice that this was an Eco pub aside from, if you look, all of the lights are LED’s and not incandescent with the exception of the bar lights which are awaiting a new type of bulb to arrive from the US. Along the bar is also a series of glowing orbs which are sun pipes bringing light down from the roof.
In a room at the rear of the bar is the rainwater harvesting tank, the manager calls it a grey water system but it is not, this feeds another tank at top of the building which has two plumb valves set at different heights so if the level drops and is not topped up from the rainwater harvesting system then it gets topped from the mains which saves dual plumbing the conveniences. Some of this water is also used to run their washing machine and there is a water conditioning tank with some sort of tablets in.
There is a huge control board in this roof space that controls all of the services in a semi automated manner, full automation is hoped for after all the systems have been bedded in as the pub opened earlier than anticipated.
On a platform outside of the toilets accessed by a window we find the solar hot water panels which are semi obscured by the maintenance platform for the wind turbine which means I guess that it will only really work in strong sunshine in the summer but they only have a limited roof space available. The turbine needs to be laid down and checked every month by an engineer which seems quite excessive to me but John will know better if this is the same for all sizable turbines regardless of horizontal or vertical orientation.
Also on this roof are their Eco-cool air conditioning units, I am not completely familiar with the technology but it is something to do with evaporation/condensation and each one supplies about 30 minutes of cold air and takes about 2 hours to recharge without the use of electricity.
Other innovations in this public house to do with the trade are the display chiller units are flash chilled rather than by fans. The beer lines are cooled by glycol units, hardly new technology to me as WWII fighters had glycol coolant systems and finally the fact that the cellar room is designed like a butchers cold room so it only has to be cooled by one small chiller unit rather than the normal 3-4.
The only other thing I can think of is the ground heat pump system, the premises has eight, one hundred metre deep bore holes that water is pumped through to bring the temperature up to about 6 degrees. This water is then fed into the same tank as the solar hot water system and then heated more if needed by electricity.
As you can see, the place is bristling with technologies and there is a leaflet being produced soon outlining them all. Many thanks to my Friend Dan, the manager, for showing us around and I look forward to seeing their reports on comparative running costs in the future as they have not even entered their first months Profit/loss yet as the pub is so new.
Darren