March 26th, 2019

Leveraging the NURO® Control in Commercial Heating Applications

The Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, NJ, recently upgraded their boiler room by installing three P-K MACH® aluminum commercial boilers with NURO® Controls. The building owners’ main goal was to replace their existing scotch marine gas fired boiler with a condensing gas fired boiler. Condensing boilers achieve high efficiency by condensing water vapor in the exhaust gases and recovering its latent heat, which would be wasted otherwise. This helps increase energy savings by reducing energy cost.

During the initial stages of the project, a side wall venting system was installed to prevent the replacement of the existing chimney. The plan was to keep one of the existing scotch marine boilers and continue to use it as a backup boiler in the event of brutally cold weather. The NURO® Control plays a large roll in this application because of its ability to communicate with other boilers and was one of the primary reasons why the three Patterson-Kelley boilers were installed, along with their side wall venting capabilities and small footprint.

“This is an interesting hybrid design between a traditional Primary-Secondary System and a Primary-Only System,” said Luke Wonnell, Director of Strategic Business Development at Industrial Combustion Associates.

The NURO® on each boiler controls a motorized isolation valve. The system includes a BACnet Protonode device that pulls data from the boilers over to Siemens’ Building Management System. The MACH® boilers operate on an automatic outdoor air temperature reset schedule which is controlled by the NURO®.  The hot water produced by the boilers feeds hydronic coils in several air handling units. This generates enough heat to satisfy demand in all the common spaces of the museum.

In the event of extreme weather, if the MACH® boilers cannot satisfy the load, the NURO®’s “Auxiliary Boiler in Cascade” feature enables the remaining non-Patterson-Kelley scotch marine boiler for backup.

This new system application was completed by Industrial Combustion Associates (ICA), the Patterson-Kelley representative in the area.

For more information on this project please contact ICA.

Download the complete Liberty Science Center Case Study.