No corrosion despite high humidity and desalinated water – Lanzarote is a very special island. The fascinating volcanic landscape, the year-round mild climate and the rushing Atlantic Ocean make it a holiday paradise visited by tourists from all over the world, despite its size of just 58 kilometres long and 34 kilometres wide.
Since 1983, Club La Santa in Tinajo in the northwest of the island has been welcoming all those who want to combine their passion for sports with their holidays.
Many professional athletes from all over the world visit the sports hotel, as the island’s climatic conditions and the resort’s facilities allow them to train outdoors all year round and thus improve their performance. Due to the success and influx of visitors, the owner decided to expand the resort in 2012. The new part of the hotel consists of 50 two-storey buildings with a total of 96 flats, a reception building, a restaurant, technical rooms, a sports centre, a conference building as well as two new Olympic swimming pools and two leisure pools. The building services, which include the heating of hot water, the temperature control of the swimming pools and the heating and cooling of the flats, restaurants, reception and conference rooms, were planned by Elías Casañas’ engineering firm Incanae. The experts for geothermal energy and energy saving relied on piping systems from aquatherm. Casañas and his team have been working with aquatherm products for 15 years and are convinced of the quality.
Three systems were installed at Club La Santa: aquatherm green for drinking water, aquatherm blue for the distribution of hot and cold water for heating and cooling, and aquatherm blue ti, a pre-insulated pipe for underground heating and cooling water distribution. In total, aquatherm supplied over eight kilometres of pipes.
“The beauty of this installation was that we could use the aquatherm pipes in combination with geothermal and solar energy,” says Elías Casañas.
The challenge for the plant engineers was to work with aggressive desalinated water and – as is typical in Lanzarote – high humidity, which results in the formation of condensation on the pipes in the cooling area. These two factors lead to corrosion, especially with metal pipes. Products from aquatherm, however, are made of the material polypropylene, which does not interact with aggressive water. Due to the simple installation, where pipe and fitting are briefly heated and then joined together, a lot of time was saved during assembly.
The plant has now been operating for six years and both the owner and the maintenance manager and engineers on the project are very happy with it.
“Products from aquatherm have provided us with solutions even in difficult situations. During the installation of the pipes, aquatherm even exceeded our initial expectations,” explains Diego Fernández, maintenance manager of Club La Santa.
“After six years of operation, the aquatherm pipes and valves are like new. There is neither corrosion nor incrustation. For this reason, the circulating pumps consume the same energy as on the first day,” says Elías Casañas.
