Coquitlam business heats up over Thermanex system

Bruce Walkinshaw

Special to The Tri-City News

Earlier this year, the City of Coquitlam installed a new heat exchange system in its new sports centre as part of a $60 million renovation project.

A city-issued news release explained that the system, called Thermenex, would reduce the building's energy use and greenhouse gas emissions by transferring unused thermal energy throughout the centre's buildings.

"This ground-breaking technology is industry leading and one way this renovation project will both improve the facility's features, as well as achieve the city's targets to reduce energy use," Mayor Richard Stewart said in the release.

And the best part: the innovative technology used by Thermenex was created by a Coquitlam company called IMEC Mechanical, said the city.

But to say that Thermenex was "created" was a bit of an understatement. Thermenex wasn't simply created, Thermenex was willed into being. Like a huge piece of dark granite is eventually willed into the figure of a man, Thermenex's design began as a huge idea in Jeff Weston's head.

An idea that would not leave the 46-year old co-owner of IMEC Mechanical alone. An idea that required hours of work and dogged consideration to realize. The idea was this: there should be a better way to manage the heating and cooling systems in buildings.

"For two or three years, I was constantly waking up in the middle of the night just thinking about it," recalls Weston, a mechanical engineer. "I couldn't quite figure it out, but my gut told me there has got to be a better way."

At the time, according to Weston, there were only two ways to heat a building. You could either create thermal energy from such sources as fossil fuels or electricity, or you could transfer thermal energy from somewhere else, like in a ground source system.

The prevailing belief held that a process that fell into the latter category, called geo-exchange (the transfer of thermal energy from the earth to a building), was one of the most efficient and therefore environmentally sustainable sources of heating. Weston challenged that belief.

"[The general public] has this image of these pumps going down into the core of the earth, where it is really hot, and bringing that heat to the surface to heat the building. But that is not the case," says Weston, explaining the temperature of the ground is actually quite cool.

"The ground is not really a heat source. It is actually something we cool down [further than it already is] so that we may get heat from the process," he said — not unlike using a big refrigerator to heat a building where the ground is the inside of the refrigerator that you are cooling simply to heat the building with the back of the appliance.

"It's more efficient to take heat out of warm air than out of the cool ground."

Furthermore, Weston explains, in order for the ground to be used by the system, heat must constantly be added to the ground or else risk overcooling the dirt, making it unusable.

Weston began to discuss his ideas with fellow mechanical engineers and designers, many of whom discouraged him from even trying. Of course, there are people in the industry that supported him too, but none more than fellow IMEC Mechanical co-owner, 55-year old Ian Hall.

"Ian was really great," recalls Weston, who used his business partner as a sounding board for his developing design. "He was always very supportive, telling tell me, 'Yeah, that makes sense.'"

Hall's support for Weston's thermal aspirations was not surprising considering the friends had built their company "on the edge of innovation."

"We were always working on ways to make designs better," he says.

The two men had met while working for different companies on many of the same jobs. They were mirror opposites of each others' ironic career paths — Weston was a mechanical engineering UBC graduate working as a contractor while Hall was a BCIT graduate who did mechanical design. Both were driven by a belief that if you combined an expertise in construction with an expertise in design, each discipline would inform the other so that you could offer customers better mechanical designs at cheeper construction costs.

"We just really enjoyed both aspects of the process," explains Weston. "We are experts at design who really like seeing the job get done."

So, one day in 1995, over a round of golf at the Westwood Plateau Golf and Country Club, the friends decided with all their combined experience (just under a quarter of a century at the time) they should be working for themselves.

"It was pretty good right from the beginning," recalls Weston of the early days of IMEC. "The day we started that company was the day we felt we retired."

But, of course, Weston and Hall hadn't retired; the two had simply gained control of the different jobs they would bid, and often work on. Over the next 14 years, the company would win many big jobs, specializing in all things mechanical.

"One of the keys to our success was that we never let our costs affect the quality of our work," Weston explains.

"Once we won a contract and agreed on the price to our clients, we would not think about the budget at all. We would just do the very best job we could on every level so that our customers would be happy with the job we were doing. And it always worked out in the end.

"In 14 years in a pretty risky business, we have never lost money on a job yet."

With all the thermal energy wasted by a buildings different cooling and heating systems, Weston speculated that the best source of thermal energy for a building is actually from within the building itself.

The result is the Thermal Energy Exchange (Thermenex) system.

The patent pending system manages the flow of thermal energy using a long fluid filled pipe, 4- to 8-inches in diameter depending on the size of the building, in which one end of the pipe is hot and the other end is cold.

"The pipe performs as an energy hub, connected to all the building's heating and cooling systems," explains Weston with enthusiasm. The piping is coiled four times, creating sections where it is: hot, warm, cool and chilled.

"When one part of the building needs heat it takes it from the hot portion of the pipe, and when it needs chilling it takes it from the cool portion of the pipe," he says.

There are two major sources of recovered heat in the Thermenex system: heat generated during the cooling process in places that require cooling year-round (electrical and computer rooms, or in Coquitlam's sports centre's case, the ice arena); and general building exhaust — the warm air generated by people using the building, he explains.

"No heat is rejected from the building until there is more thermal energy than the building needs and no heat is added to the building until it has used all of its own thermal energy," says Weston.

"In a climate (like ours, requiring more heat throughout the year than cooling) about 75% of a typical building's annual thermal energy for heating will come from itself."

Looking forward, Weston hopes to sell his energy exchange system to more contractors while constantly tinkering with the design to make it even more efficient. And then there is the lengthy patent process, which he is currently undertaking in the U.S.A. so as to cover most of the world.

Weston also hopes to design a system to convert the ocean's energy into heat, without creating greenhouse gas.

"The dream is that all coastal communities could get heat from the ocean, including residential [buildings]," he explains.

"Basically, [it would] expand the system from a single building to a neighbourhood sharing thermal energy."

Today, Weston enjoys his family, friends and job. He enjoys designing and he enjoys the fact that he may well have designed one of the great innovations in sustainable thermal energy usage.

He also enjoys getting a good night's sleep.

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