Air Conditioning Chiller Replacement 6 Grosvenor Street

Klima-Therm and sister company LH plc have completed a challenging air conditioning chiller replacement project at 6 Grosvenor Street, London.

Cooling plant serving the prestigious 6-storey building in the heart of Mayfair had been added piecemeal over many years as use of the building changed. Existing plant included two aging chillers with remote condensers, and a variety of outdoor units from adjacent premises.

The challenge

The result was an extremely cramped plant room, with limited room for servicing work and poor heat rejection as a result of air recirculation in the space due to the density of equipment.

The building was undergoing a major refurbishment. The brief was to install a modern, efficient replacement system plus all necessary works to ensure full cooling capacity and reliable operation.

The existing split system chillers were located at low level with their respective condensers at high level, making servicing virtually impossible. Therefore a new approach was required, which necessitated a root and branch review.

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Our solution

Our solution involved stripping out and simplifying the existing pipework and outdoor units, and replacing the chillers and remote condensers. This required reconfiguring the legacy system in order to improve heat rejection efficiency, hydraulic performance and control.

At the heart of the new system is a 430kW ultra-compact Rhoss TCAESY 4435 ASDP1 packaged air-cooled chiller, equipped with integral primary pumps and buffer vessel. This compact, high efficiency chiller was an ideal fit for the tight confines of the plant room, and provided the reliability and performance required for the high-value office accommodation in the newly refurbished building.

Turnkey project

Installation work, which was done on a turnkey basis, included removal of existing pipework, installation of new electrics, craneage, plant movement and overall project management. To ensure effective heat rejection, a bespoke plenum was fitted to the new chiller fan deck, and bespoke shrouds installed on the outdoor condensing units that share the same plant space.

The original primary pumps were removed and replaced with new, creating a duty and standby secondary pumping arrangement. New pressurisation and side-stream filtration units were also installed.

Additional work

As part of the project, an old and inefficient belt-driven extract Air Handling Unit was replaced with a new mixed-flow EC fan unit, and existing soil vent pipework that had been poorly routed in the past was re-routed for improved space utilisation.

Exacting

The project required exacting attention to detail in order to ensure plant fitted in the tight confines of the space, with sufficient room for service and maintenance operations. Our many years’ experience of operating in cramped inner city projects of this kind, coupled with the excellent space-saving design of the Rhoss equipment, enabled us to deliver a high quality solution befitting the prestigious credentials of the building.

Factory visit

As part of the project, specifier Taylor Project Services, contractor SW Bruce Limited and client Grosvenor Estates visited the Rhoss factory in Italy in advance of the chiller’s delivery, and were impressed by the company’s meticulous and high quality approach to manufacturing and testing.

The project was successfully commissioned and handed over to the client in April 2018.