Central Chiller Plant Retrofit
Special Projects
:+ : By Jeff Morasch
1201 3rd Building
1201 3rd has 55 stories with over 1,128,575 square feet of premier business space. The building is LEED Platinum certified; Energy Star certified. The 1201 3rd building was completed in 1988, and with the owners push to be as energy efficient as possible, it was time to look at new chiller plant options. The original chiller plant had three chillers with the pumps piped directly to only one chiller and one cooling tower – (1) 140-ton, (1) 1060-ton & (1) 550-ton chiller.
MacDonald-Miller designed a plan to use common headered piping on both the condenser and the chilled water systems. The idea is that any pump can be used with any chiller or cooling tower. We recently used this same approach at Two Union Square for Washington Holding, and knew it would be a successful way to meet the objectives of this project.
Chiller plant retrofit replacement of a 1060-ton, 550-ton and 140-ton chillers with two new Trane 650-ton and one 125-ton Arctic Turbocor chillers. (8) pumps with VFD’s and all mechanical space piping being converted to a fully headered/redundant system. Replacement of 2 floors of 18” chiller water header piping. The equipment was in the basement of the building, and we had to bring all equipment down a set of stairs, with six pumps at the bottom of a set of stairs and (2) pumps were on the 33rd floor.
With the two large chillers 12 feet tall and 17 feet long and weighing over 20,000 lbs, the difficult portion of the job was bringing all the equipment down a set of stairs with inches to spare. Todd Zeller, our chiller foreman, worked with Trane to disassemble the chillers so they would fit through two sets of double doors and could move down a hallway. Jason Stetz, our special projects piping foreman, took initiative and designed a platform so that all equipment could be pushed over the stairs and then lowered into place using overhead gantry.
This job was completed using minimal subcontractors and every MacDonald-Miller team performed excellent! I would like to thank our fabrication shop, delivery drivers, pipe fitters, utility crews, and electricians as I could not imagine performing this work with a better team!!
PROJECT TEAM MEMBERS
Building Owner: Wright Runstad & Company – Jeff Kasowski, Nic Markle, Mark Sanders
Engineer of Record: Engineering Economics, Inc. – Jeff Nichols, PE
General Contractor: MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions – Jeff Morasch (SSP Sales & Project manager)
Mechanical & Controls Engineer: MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions – Ben Gezon (Engineering Manager), Daniel Ward (BPG Controls Engineer)
Mechanical Contractor: MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions – Jeff Morasch (SSP Sales & Project manager)
Pipe fitting team: MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions – Jason Zembrycki (SPTI Superintendent), Mike Pinchin (P & PF Foreman), Jason Stetz (SPTI Pipe Fitting Foreman)
Line Voltage Electrical team: MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions – Clayton Parker (Electrical Superintendent), Ryan MacFarlan, David Goff
Utility & General Construction team: MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions – Jay Scroggs (Utility Superintendent), Glenn Graham (Utility Foreman)
Test & Balance team: MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions – Ron Landberg (TAB Supervisor), Casey Williams (TAB Specialist)
Subcontractors: Evergreen Power Systems, K Fox Insulation, Northwest Metals
More here: Chiller Services