Ballyliffin Lodge and Spa Sustainability Commitments

Location	Ireland
Product	RAUTHERMEX
Installer	CHP Mechanical Services Ltd
Year	2025

Situated in one of the most scenic locations in all of Ireland, the team at Ballyliffin Lodge take great care to look after their local area and adopt green solutions wherever possible.

Ireland’s most northerly four-star hotel, the Ballyliffin Lodge and Spa (Ballyliffin Lodge) is nestled on Donegal’s Inishowen Peninsula, offering panoramic views over Malin Head. Its spectacular setting highlights the hotel's dedication to preserving the area's natural beauty, as further evidenced by its use of green technologies to heat, water and power its 40 rooms, spa, gym and restaurant.

Steps taken to achieve this aim include installing a large 288kW solar array to the rear of the hotel and commissioning a natural spring well to reduce water usage and mains consumption. Yet one of Ballyliffin Lodge’s most ambitious projects involved upgrading its heating system to include a 500kW, biomass boiler, burning woodchips to supply its heating and hot water needs.

Reducing Carbon, Reducing Costs

Supported by a €450,000 investment and grants from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland’s Support Scheme for Renewable Heat, this project is crucial to the hotel's goals of adopting greener practices and reducing operating costs. With Ireland’s carbon tax set to rise annually from €56 per tonne of CO₂ at present, to €100 per tonne by 2030, installing a boiler that would save up to 250 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually made clear commercial sense for the hotel.

“We’re in an area of stunning natural beauty and protecting and maintaining that is very important,” says Ron Kerrigan, Hotel General Manager for Ballyliffin Lodge and Spa. “It’s very cost-effective to carry out these sorts of initiatives, and the installation of this boiler would improve the hotel’s efficiency throughout.

“People not in the know would think ‘oh, you’re cutting down trees, you’re cutting down forests, how does that work?’ But it’s a renewable source of heat and energy, and the trees go through an eight-year life cycle, so as quick as we’re cutting them, we’re also planting them, preserving and maintaining the local area’s greenery.”

Making Molehills Out of Mountains

To carry out this project, Ballyliffin Lodge engaged the services of CHP Mechanical Services Ltd, a County Down-based renewable energy and commercial heating installer specialising in Biomass boiler installations including off-site prefabricated plant rooms. The need to preserve the peninsula’s pristine environment meant this expertise was a priority, as the existing building proposed to house the boiler was situated a kilometre away from the hotel – in this case, on the side of a nearby mountain.

Faced with this challenge, the team at CHP Mechanical Services Ltd specified a Herz Firematic 499kw Biomass Boiler with a 50m³ adjoining space within the building from which woodchips are transferred via a spring agitator and screw conveyor. In order to efficiently transfer heat from the plant room to Ballyliffin Lodge’s buildings without disrupting the local landscape, CHP Mechanical Services Ltd needed suitable underground pre-insulated pipework that could offer excellent thermal performance.

The distance from the hotel presented other logistical concerns. With no roads going up the side of the mountain to the biomass boiler plant room, and very few in the local area at all, the specified pipework needed to be lightweight and flexible. As the hotel’s operations could not be interrupted, a final requirement for the pipework was speed of installation to ensure there wasn’t any downtime.

Enduring Supply Chain Relationships

“The nature of Ballyliffin Lodge’s business and location presented clear challenges for this particular project,” says John Smyth, Managing Director of CHP Mechanical Services Ltd. “After all, if you can’t transfer its heat effectively through its pipes, it doesn’t matter how effective and sustainable your boiler is.

“We’ve been installing this kind of system for over 13 years, so we know the importance of only working with proven, reliable manufacturers for all components. This includes pipework, which is extremely important on projects of this kind.

We've had a long and solid relationship with REHAU, using its PE-Xa pipe, RAUTHERMEX, to connect offsite plantrooms to buildings. The team is very familiar with this pipe system and have always been impressed with its reliability, thermal performance and how easy it is to install."

IREHAU’s RAUTHERMEX bonded pipe system consists of a polyurethane foam insulation core and a corrugated outer jacket that keeps operational heat losses particularly low. Its fine-pored PU foam, developed using specialist process technology, offers high thermal insulation, making it ideal for linking Ballyliffin Lodge’s buildings to the boiler plantroom a kilometre away

Making a Connection

Alongside its thermal performance benefits, RAUTHERMEX’s unique connection technology, EVERLOC, offered a level of ease of installation and reliability for CHP Mechanical Services Ltd. It uses a compression sleeve to create a permanently leak-tight connection between the pipe and the fitting, with no O-rings or other sealants, producing an independently certified cavity-free joint. As the pipe itself is the sealant, the installation is immediately ready for pressure and a simple visual inspection is sufficient to know if the connection is complete.

For projects such as Ballyliffin Lodge where swift installation over long distances of pipework is key, this ability to quickly and comprehensively fit and inspect a flexible pipe system is invaluable. Having worked with REHAU systems for around 13 years CHP Mechanical Services Ltd are very familiar with the complete REHAU system.

“Being able to quickly procure, transport and fit pipework is imperative for this sort of project,” says John. “The hotel was keen to avoid downtime, so the fact REHAU was able to provide the swift support and high-quality products we’ve come to expect was highly appreciated.

“To solve issues around the lack of roads, we actually constructed a bespoke de-coiling machine to lay down the one kilometre of RAUTHERMEX required. It proved highly successful, largely due to the flexibility of the pipe systems, and it is certainly something we will consider using again.”

Empowering Businesses to Go Green

With these complex logistics in mind, Mark Thompson, Area Sales Manager for REHAU Building Solutions Northern Ireland & Republic of Ireland, was also on hand to ensure the project’s smooth running. With the boiler now installed and running, the success of Ballyliffin Lodge’s uniquely complex works has resulted in further enquiries from other hotels in Ireland.

Moreover, testament to the success of both this installation and that of the other green upgrades implemented is the fact that Ballyliffin Lodge was shortlisted as a finalist for the 2024 edition of the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland’s Energy Awards[1].

“The rising carbon tax is definitely focusing minds for businesses such as hotels,” he explains. “As the works at Ballyliffin Lodge show, transitioning to greener heating systems is a sensible commercial decision.

“The CHP Mechanical Services Ltd team have clearly demonstrated what an excellent installation looks like in this field. Using our leading RAUTHERMEX components, their expertise clearly demonstrates what’s possible even in remote areas such as the Inishowen Peninsula. We advise similarly situated businesses to explore environmentally sympathetic boilers and offsite plantrooms, especially in national markets accelerating their decarbonisation efforts.”

Ballyliffin Lodge Hotel and Spa’s sustainability efforts

CHP Mechanical Services Ltd

Find out more about RAUTHERMEX

[1] https://www.seai.ie/case-studies/-hotel-implements-suite-energy-upgrades