Energy Saving Product or Innovation of the Year
Recognising building services solutions that reduce the amount of energy used in buildings through the efficient use of energy by the product/innovation itself
Winner: The Encore Cistern - The Green Futures Initiative
The revolutionary Encore cistern is the only concealed cistern that directly uses waste condensate from air conditioning units to flush its toilets.
With its experience of designing, building and installing M&E building services, Green Futures saw how condensate produced by air conditioning units just went down the drain. No cost-effective solutions were available to use condensation for flushing toilets, so the company invented one – Encore.
Encore has a dual-chamber 18-litre tank, so multiple flushes can be achieved before the need for a mains-fed back-up supply. The cistern attracts BREEAM and LEED credits for new builds, and can be retrofitted within normal industry service voids.
The Encore can be used in projects ranging from hotels to offices, leisure centres to retail parks – any building that uses air conditioning. Green Futures has carried out calculations on a typical 150-bed hotel for the Marriott in Washington DC and found that in normal operating conditions the hotel could save more than 64 million litres of water over a 25-year period.
The Encore cistern is fully recyclable, and all the plastics in the cistern can be ground up and reused for other products.
Judges’ comments:
‘A really innovative solution.’
‘We liked the range of potential applications, being suitable for retrofit and new-build.’
‘Minimal on cost for application of this product.’
The extent of thought clearly given to the development of the product was highly impressive
Finalists:
Allure Unitouch – Distech Controls
Insulation Retaining Clip – Crickhowell Contractors
Menerga Adconair Adiabatic zeroGWP – FC – free supply-air cooling – Systemair