Tight schedules met on time

When is the best time to complete an HVAC renovation project? If you own/operate a school, it’s probably during summer break. However, that means keeping a strict install and start up schedule, which doesn’t leave much room for mistakes or lost shipments.

Luckily, our team at HTS takes these projects and looks at them as a way to innovate a solution where one doesn’t seem likely. Erin Schroeder, one of our burgeoning sales representatives in Houston, details a recent obstacle and how she and her team overcame it.

A consulting engineer in Houston came to HTS with a K-12 summer project. This was in mid June and the project needed to be completed with equipment running by the first day of the new school year. Two air cooled chillers were up for replacement. With the standard lead time at 10 weeks for air cooled scroll chillers, stock units were the only viable option. Fortunately, Daikin Applied caters to the Houston chiller replacement market by stocking units with typical options for Texas including electrofin coil coatings.

Selections were made for (2) 120 ton air cooled scroll chillers and sent to the engineer. However, once the units were re-rated at 105 ambient, overall capacity was reduced below the required load. The simple solution would have been to move into the next chiller size, a nominal 140 ton unit. Unfortunately, one of the stock 140 ton chillers had already been reserved by another Daikin Applied rep office.

Thinking outside the box, the HTS team suggested adding Evaporcool to the replacement chillers to increase the capacity output of the in-stock, smaller chillers. Evaporcool is a technology which incorporates evaporative cooling into air cooled condensers, making the equipment believe it is seeing much lower ambient temperatures and therefore producing more tonnage without using additional power.

This innovative thinking allowed the owner access to the in stock equipment and kept the project on schedule.