People dancing in the big hall at The Bath House. Pic: The Bath House.
A community venue in Hackney Wick is planning to renovate their heating system to capture warmth from people dancing and use it to heat their building.
The Bath House, which hosts a range of community events, including dance sessions with hundreds of people attending every week, is fundraising to make the renovation possible.
The technology that would allow them to extract heat from dancing already exists in their big hall where their dance events take place, but it hasn’t been working nor been used properly for many years.
Neil McDonald, director of The Bath House, told Eastlondonlines: “We shouldn’t actually need to use any gas to be able to heat this building, keep it a warm space for lots of different community members, we just need to dance a lot.
“Community is energy, and we can harness it in different ways, not only in the vibe or the care that people take for each other, but literally in physical body heat, and it’s quite simple technology.”
Neil McDonald outside The Bath House. Pic: Cornelia Falknäs
The venue has a central ring in their heating system that is mostly designed to be heated up from gas boilers, and then feeds the radiators with hot water.
The cooled down water then comes back through the pipes into the central ring and gets heated up again.
McDonald explained: “What we’ve also got is, in the hall when we’ve got 100 people dancing twice a week, or when we’ve got 300 people dancing at some other events for like eight hours, every person dancing, on average, produces about 500 watts of energy.
“So six people make like a big domestic three-kilowatt heater, a huge amount of energy. So we got 100 people, that’s like 50 kilowatts of energy being produced from people eating food, dancing, getting their mitochondria working and producing heat.”
In the big hall they have an extractor, which pulls out the hot sweaty air and pushes it outside, but inside the extractor, a heat exchange happens when cold water comes through and is heated up by the hot air.
The water has then been heated with the energy captured from the dancing, and can be pushed back into the heating system.
McDonald’s simplified illustration of how the heating system will work. Pic: Cornelia Falknäs.
McDonald explained: “While the system has existed, it’s never been used like this before. And so technologically, it’s not just the pipes that is the technology. It’s the pipes and the culture of the space itself and the people in the space that allow a new technology.”
The first step in the renovation is to get this extractor technology to work, but they also want to use similar technology to capture and reuse heat produced in the community saunas in their backyard.
According to McDonald, this would produce more than enough energy for them to heat their entire building without gas.
The venue organisers estimate that this renovation could save them up to £60,000 per year, allowing them to use that money for more community projects while making sure that the building is a warm space where those who can’t afford to heat their homes can take refuge.
In the future, organisers also aim to get permission from the council to extend the technology beyond their space, allowing local residents to use the heat generated in The Bath House in their homes.
McDonald said: “When we’re doing that, we have far more heat than we’re able to manage. So really, the best place to store it is in other people’s houses. So we’re producing it, and we can dig a hole in the road, send it through the street, into pipes, tap into the existing systems, then they’re not needing to use gas in their own homes. They just take it from our pipes.”
To raise an initial £6,000 to fund the renovations the Bath House will be putting on a fundraiser festival on the weekend of November 16 and 17, and they also have a crowdfunder page people can donate to.
McDonald said he hopes this initiative can inspire others to do similar things: “I’m sure these things happen all over the place as well, or similar things, but if people have access to seeing things like this and they’re being reported, then other people will start to do it.
“And maybe they ask for help, or maybe they understand, and they can crack on and do it. And then the more we start to inspire people to do this kind of thing themselves, then this is how we change the world. Global politics starts at the grassroots.”
