Most industrial sites buy heat and reject heat in the same hour, in different parts of the building, and nobody has ever put the two on the same page. The reason heat recovery disappoints is almost never the quantity of heat available — it is temperature, timing and distance, and those are what an honest assessment measures first.
Heat recovery projects fail for predictable reasons, and all four of them are knowable before any money is spent.
| Question | Why it decides the project |
|---|---|
| 1. Temperature | Heat is only useful above the temperature of the thing you want to heat. A large quantity of 30°C air cannot make 80°C water, and no heat exchanger changes that. The grade of the available heat, not its quantity, is the first filter. |
| 2. Timing | Rejected heat and required heat must coincide, or storage has to bridge them. A dryer rejecting heat on day shift and a space-heating load that peaks overnight are not a match without a store, and the store is usually what kills the payback. |
| 3. Distance | Pipework, insulation, pumping and civil work scale with distance, and they are most of the capital cost. Two loads in the same room is a different project from two loads at opposite ends of a site. |
| 4. Fouling and maintenance | Recovery surfaces in dirty, humid or greasy streams foul, and performance decays to nothing if nobody cleans them. A project that assumes clean surfaces forever is a project that works for one year. |
Frequently that the recovery project does not pay, and why — usually temperature or timing. That is a useful answer: it stops a capital proposal that would have underperformed, and it redirects the budget to the measures on the same site that do pay. A consultant who finds a recoverable opportunity in every building is not measuring.
Gas-side studies are fundable through Enbridge Commercial Custom Audits & Studies — up to 50% of cost, $10,000 commercial or $20,000 institutional, minimum 100,000 m³ a year, pre-approval required — and the implementation through the Commercial Custom Retrofit Program at up to $0.40/m³ saved. Electrical savings route through IESO XLerate where they clear 600 MWh a year, with feasibility cost-shared at 50%.
Verified 3 October 2026. Terms, caps and sources on the programme index; the gates in one table on eligibility.
The exchanger is usually a minority of the cost and almost never the reason a project fails. Ask what the assumed coincidence between the source and the load is, what happens in the hours when they do not coincide, and who cleans the surfaces. If those three have answers, the quote is probably sound.
Rarely, and a proposal that claims it should be read carefully. Recovery typically reduces load rather than removing it, and the plant still has to meet peak demand on the coldest day with the process running. What recovery can change is how often the boilers fire and how hard.
No. We assess, quantify and specify to the point where it can be tendered, and we sell no equipment and take no contractor commission. Detailed design and any sealed work belongs to the engineers qualified to do it.
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