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Situation
Saddleback Apartments in Palm Springs, CA was having issues with boilers and tanks constantly going down for heat exchanger issues with only 10 total years of use. Each time one of the heat exchangers from a 750,000 BTU/H, .82 efficiency boiler would leak, 20 apartments would be out of hot water for an extended period of time. Saddleback needed a more durable and efficient solution with built-in redundancy to supply the families living in these apartments with hot water. The catch, Louis Dombrowski and his team as Crossfire Corp. only had 5 hours to remove and install a new system.
Solution
Dombrowski and Crossfire Corp. prefabricated a 6-unit Navien NPE-240A tankless water heater system on Ready-Link® Racks in their warehouse before transporting and craning the system into place at Saddleback Apartments. The 6 tankless water heaters cascaded and mounted together back-to-back on racks and with Navien outdoor vent caps allowed the new system to fit in the outdoor space previously occupied by the leaking boiler and tank and added built-in redundancy to the system.
After replacing each of the two failing boilers at Saddleback Apartments with 6-unit Navien tankless water heater systems and seeing the benefits of Navien, Saddlback now plans to replace each of the boilers within the apartment complex with a Navien tankless water heater system.
Benefits
High efficiency and cost savings: The NPE tankless water heaters offer .96 UEF efficiency rating, well over the .82 EF that the old boiler system had. “By going with the space-saving Navien tankless water heater system where we could prefabricate on Ready-Link Racks, instead of just another boiler, we were able to help save Saddleback Apartments approximately $10,000 on this project,” said Dombrowski.
Redundancy and reliability: Navien NPE tankless water heaters cascaded together allows the high demand of water to be shared across all the units which helps to maintain consistent temperature, improve life longevity of the system, and provide hot water should a unit need maintenance. With a strong commercial warranty, the system at Saddleback Apartments should be running for many years to come.