Special Projects: Financial Center
MacDonald-Miller was working on York chillers at the Puget Sound Plaza building when our customer approached us about a steam work project at another one of their buildings. A steam study report by Northwest Energy Consulting recommended replacing all the HVAC electric heating in the facility. By replacing their electric boiler, electric heat exchanger and air handler electric heating elements with three steam heat exchangers, the client would greatly reduce their monthly heating costs.
The steam work includes pumping the steam condensate through a unit heater in the building’s return air to drop the condensate temperature before sending to a building drain, which also preheats the building’s fresh air. The heat recovery prevents employing a condensate cooler, which uses fresh water and then dumps both the condensate and fresh water down the drain.
Equipment sizing challenges combined with scheduling constraints made this project quite a formidable task. Due to working constraints at the building, our crews had to start at 4 am each day and could continue after 7 am, only if they kept noise to a bare minimum. They also had to work four Sundays in a row. The planning and attention to detail resulted in a successful project – a impressive feat given the restricted working environment.
Thanks to the team effort by:
- Jason Zembrycki, SPTI Superintendent, for supplying the labor and material budgets to build a proposal.
- Mike Pinchin, SPTI Pipefitting Superintendent, for creating drawings and providing innovative ideas that would fit limited workspaces.
- Jason Stetz, SPTI Pipefitting Foreman, who invested a lot of time and energy laying out the project with the idea of taking up the least amount ofspace while allowing room to service all components.
- Byron Cross, Electrical Service Foreman for working on the electrical portion of the job.
- Tim Felton and his crew for installing the unit heater waaaay up in the air.
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