Chiller Heat Extraction: The Recovery Room Challenge

Every kilowatt your chiller uses to cool your pool generates another kilowatt of heat that has to go somewhere.

Most recovery room owners zero in on cooling power when picking a chiller. It’s understandable—cold pools are your bread and butter. But here’s the catch suppliers often skip: dealing with the heat your chiller pumps out can cost more than running the thing itself.

The Physics Problem

A chiller is a heat transfer machine at its core. It pulls heat from your pool water and dumps it somewhere else—typically the air around it. For every kilowatt of cooling you get in the pool, you’re left with a kilowatt of heat. That heat doesn’t vanish; it usually lands right in your recovery room or a nearby space.

What Suppliers Say (And Why It’s Off Base)

Suppliers might brush it off with a few common lines, but they don’t hold up:

1. "The room will just absorb it"
   Reality: Unless your room is endlessly vast, it’ll hit a limit. The air saturates, and temperatures climb.
2. "Your air conditioning can handle it"
   Reality: That’s double dipping on costs. You pay to cool the pool, then pay again to cool the room down.
3. "It’s not that much heat"
   Reality: A modest 10kW chiller churns out enough heat to bump a 20m² room up 10°C in an hour.
   
   

The Real Cost

Managing that heat isn’t cheap. Most recovery rooms end up needing a ventilation system—think $15,000 to $30,000—just to move it out. That’s no stretch; industrial chillers push a ton of hot air that demands extraction.

Summer Makes It Worse

In Australian summers, ambient temperatures soar, and your chiller has to grind harder to keep pools cold. That extra effort means more heat output, spiking energy bills further. It’s a brutal loop: higher temps, harder work, more heat, bigger costs. Over time, it wears down the chiller and stresses nearby gear.

The Solutions

The simplest fix seems to be sticking the chiller outside. But that brings its own headaches. Water travels through long pipes, picking up 1-2 degrees of warmth before hitting the pool—undoing some of your cooling and nudging energy costs up again.

If you can park the chiller just outside the wall, with less than 10 meters of pipe, that’s manageable. Beyond that, you need a smarter approach.

That’s where our split system comes in:

• Condenser and compressors (the heat-generating parts) stay outside.

• Heat exchanger (the cooling piece) sits right by the pool.

• Result: You get the best of both worlds—proven in high-rises and shopping malls.

Before You Buy

If you’re sizing up a chiller for your recovery room or sports club, dig into these heat management costs first. We’ve seen too many setups blindsided by massive ventilation bills they never saw coming. Plan for the heat, not just the cold.