A FALMOUTH engineering company working at the cutting edge of environmentally friendly heating and cooling systems is helping to take the country's biggest water park into the 21st century.

Kensa Engineering, based on the Tregoniggie Industrial Estate, has completed the new system at the Cotswold Water Park.

Designed by managing director Richard Freeborn, the system uses a series of specially manufactured plastic arrays sunk in one of the park's huge ponds to give heating and cooling to two large buildings.

"Instead of using an oil or gas boiler to heat the buildings, which always involves pollution from chimneys, we absorb heat from the large pond next to them," said Mr Freeborn.

"This will use around 50 per cent of the primary energy that would be used by a 'best of the best' condensing gas boiler. Most people are surprised to learn that the biggest single source of pollution isn't cars, industry or power stations - it's the fossil fuel boilers that are the bad guys, and they will slowly be replaced by heat pumps as the costs of oil and gas increase."

Large quantities of inert plastic pipe are lowered into the pond and a special fluid is circulated through the pipes to the heat pumps. The heat pumps are highly specialised, and Kensa is the only British company with the technology to manufacture them.

The system absorbs the heat from the lake in the winter and changes round to remove heat from the building in summer, rejecting it to the lake to provide summer cooling. This method saves up to 70 per cent of the "carbon" emissions.

The company has been designing similar systems and putting them in place all over the country - and abroad -- for over five years now. Five staff were involved in the Cotswold Water Park project.