What the mountain gives us, we do not waste.
Stories from a thermal bath that takes its water seriously.
We are not talking about earning a better label. We are talking about how the water is treated here, where the warmth goes when it leaves our pools, and why that matters to the people in the village.
51 degrees. 40 years. Zero oil.
The water you are lying in has spent decades travelling through the rock. It arrives at 51 °C from the source — a gift of warmth, without a single kilowatt-hour from us. Since 2015 not a drop of oil. We tell the last leg of its journey: the one that begins with us.
What is left heats the house next door.
When our thermal water leaves the pools, it is still warm. Too warm to simply flow away. So it does not — it moves into the house next door.
A thermal bath produces huge amounts of warm waste water. 120 m³ gather in our collection basin, still at around 34 degrees. That is the remaining warmth of a decades-long journey through the mountain — you do not throw that away.
In the past this water flowed unused into the sewer. Warm water warming no one, though it could have heated half the neighbourhood. Until 2015 we burned oil for our heating — like almost every larger business in the mountains.
Today we hand the remaining warmth to our heat pumps. 180 kilowatts of system output, three buildings heated. One of them: the Haus City directly next to us — with apartments, shops, restaurants. An ordinary everyday place in the village, right in the middle, heated by the bath next door. And whatever is finally left flows into the municipality’s new district heating plant and warms further homes in Leukerbad.
A warm apartment next door, filled with water that was rain decades ago.
Facts
- Collection basin: 34 °C, 120 m³
- Heat pumps: 180 kW system output
- Three buildings heated — one of them the Haus City (apartments, shops, restaurants)
- Complete phase-out of oil since 2015
- Surplus goes into the new district heating plant of the municipality of Leukerbad
And what else is coming?
Three more stories are in progress — about arriving by train, about the people who grow our food in the Valais, and about the team that has stayed with us for years. We will publish them once the people behind them have time for a photo and a conversation.