SPACE HEATING

Series

Series Name: Mining Review 5th Year

Issue

Issue No.

Date Released

Oct 1951

Stories in this Issue:

Story

Story No. within this Issue

2 / 4

Summary

BFI synopsis: heat pump at the Royal Festival Hall.
NCB Commentary - The Royal Festival Hall, the most up-to-date concert hall in the world, will be London’s permanent reminder of the 1951 Festival.
Seating 3,000 people in luxurious surroundings it’s a big place to keep warm. To get a clue to how that’s done we have to go out into the middle of the Thames, to where this pipeline sticks into the water.
And what’s all this maze of equipment? That’s a compressor - it’s the heart of the new systme that provides the heat. And this is an ex-RAF Merlin engine that gives the drive, and a lot of noise, too.
But let’s look at how the heating system works at the Festival Hall. Really it’s just like a refrigerator in reverse. Water is sucked in from the Thames, through a heat exchanger and pumped back again. It’s cold water, but as it’s above freezing point there must still be some warmth left in it. Now, in the heat exchanger , a very cold liquid absorbs this warmth and turns to vapour. Now is goes to the compressor, driven by the Merlin engine. Here the warmth is compressed - concentrated - and becomes heat, at about 168 degrees.
The hot vapour flows through another heat exchanger where it gives up its heat to the water in the Festival Hall radiator system. And so the tiny amount of heat in every gallon of Old Father Thames, concentrated thousands of times, warms this great concert hall.
And if you put the system in reverse it really can work like a fridge and cool the place in the summer. Believe it or not, the heat pump is ten times as efficient as the ordinary boilers.

Researcher Comments

BFI sources suugest that this story was filmed on the 19th February 1951. Commentary recorded 7 September 1951.

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