Bow Creek Recreational Center
City of Virginia Beach, Virginia

The Bow Creek Recreation Center is a 67,743 square foot, $28 million, state-of-the-art facility complete with an indoor swimming pool, cardio/weight training area, group fitness studio, indoor double gym, a youth game room, classroom space for early childhood programs and meeting rooms.

The HVAC central plant at Bow Creek Recreation Center is unique compared to traditional cooling and heating systems. Instead of rejecting heat to the atmosphere for cooling or using natural gas for heating, there are four modular reversible chillers (totaling 200 cooling tons) capable of simultaneously generating chilled water for cooling and hot water for heating. For example, when there is a need for both cooling and heating, the reversible chillers extract the heat from the cooling loop and reject it into the heating loop. When there is an excess of either heating or cooling, the modular reversible chillers are also connected to an energy source/sink consisting of 160 geothermal wells that are each 300 feet in depth. There is also an air-cooled chiller and piping connections to the pool gas fired boiler for secondary cooling and heating sources. In addition to building heat, the hot water is also used to heat the pool and preheat the domestic water. The gym and natatorium are served by dedicated single zone rooftop units. The multipurpose, fitness, child minding, offices, and the rest of the building is served by variable volume rooftop units with series fan powered terminal units. All rooftop units utilize heat recovery to pretreat the outside air, either by energy wheel or heat pipe.

This is the first recreation center in Virginia Beach to incorporate a 100% LED lighting design to provide a 0.71 W/SQFT lighting power density, which is a 35% reduction in installed wattage compared to traditional fluorescent and HID systems. The facility also includes a cutting edge lighting control system which is comprised of a completely networked relay/dimming system which allows the staff to control all lighting within the facility from one central computer, as well as provide real time information on the status of all lighting and daylight harvesting systems. The two story atrium, Gymnasium and Pool areas are provided with daylight harvesting systems which reduces lighting power consumption by automatically dimming the light fixtures based on the available daylight within the space.