Ai-TEC adds commercial heat pump water heaters for Gauteng hotels, hospitals and laundries

A bank of four commercial air-source heat pumps on a building roof in Boksburg, piped to the plant room below

The Boksburg heat plant specialist now supplies, retrofits and services air-source heat pump banks sized for Highveld winter mornings.

BOKSBURG, SOUTH AFRICA, October 20, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Ai-TEC, the Jet Park, Boksburg supplier and service contractor for commercial boilers, calorifiers and inline heaters, has added commercial heat pump water heaters to its plant range.

The addition comes from what the team sees on service calls: hotels, hospitals, hostels and laundries across Gauteng still heat most of their hot water with calorifier elements, and on many of those sites water heating is one of the largest lines on the electricity bill. An air-source heat pump takes heat from the outside air instead, and a well-sized commercial unit typically puts three to four units of heat into the water for every unit of electricity it uses on a mild day.

Most of the jobs are retrofits rather than new plant rooms. The heat pump heats water into the existing calorifier, or into a buffer vessel ahead of it, and the elements or boiler coil already in place finish the job when needed. Single units in the range run from about 10 kW to 40 kW of heat output, and larger sites use banks of two to eight units piped in parallel, so one unit can be serviced while the rest keep heating.

"The question we get on every site visit is whether it will cope at six in the morning in June," Ai-TEC said. "On the Highveld the air can be close to freezing right when the shower peak hits, and a heat pump gives less heat in cold air. So we size the bank and the storage for that morning, not for the brochure figure, and we leave the elements in as backup. If a site only uses a little hot water, or already has a boiler running all day with capacity to spare, we tell them the heat pump probably won't pay."

Gauteng's hard water gets attention in every design. Scale inside a heat pump's heat exchanger steadily cuts its output, so on hard-water sites Ai-TEC fits a softener or puts a plate heat exchanger between the heat pump and the hot water, where scale can be cleaned off. Stored water is held at 60 °C, with a regular pasteurisation cycle for legionella control.

Power cuts are part of the brief too. A heat pump needs electricity to run, so the stored water carries the site through an outage. Because the units draw roughly a third of the power of the elements they replace, they are much easier to keep going from a generator, and the controls bring them back one at a time when power returns.

Hotels, clinics and factories looking at a quote are asked for their current hot water use or bed and shower count, peak hours, existing storage, the electrical supply at the plant room, a water hardness result if one is available, and photos of the plant room and the space outside.

About Ai-TEC

Ai-TEC has worked on commercial and industrial heat plant since 2009 from its base in Jet Park, Boksburg. It supplies, maintains and repairs steam and hot water boilers, calorifiers, inline heaters, incinerators and now heat pump water heaters for sites across Boksburg, Kempton Park, Germiston, Pretoria, Midrand and Sandton, and travels nationally for larger jobs. It works within the same South African trade network as equipment supplier am.co.za. Ai-TEC is operated by Astros Marketing (Pty) Ltd, 2 Makro Place, Sunnyrock 1401.

Poppy, Director's PA
Ai-TEC
+27 60 600 6000