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Time & Life Replacement Chiller Plant
There are a number of other tenants who also call Time & Life home besides the publishing company. Most of these also have process cooling requirements and are permitted to tap the process risers for cooling.
One of the advantages of working with RGDC is that they have engineers on staff who are made available to the consultant, similar to large research and development companies. This allows much faster response time and more importantly, allowed us to obtain direct input from the owner/user. In our meetings with the owner's engineering group, several ideas for the new plant were reviewed. These were:
  1. Consolidating both plants into a single plant that would be more easily operated and also provide better diversity in operation. The lower level chiller room was the only location with sufficient area.
  2. With deregulation of utilities, alternate energy sources for the plant would provide the flexibility to choose the optimum energy source based on availability and cost.
  3. While it was recognized that the existing plants were close to the end of their useful rated life, first cost was a major consideration and any new technology considered required a reasonable payback.
  4. No interruption of chilled water services to the occupants would be tolerated.
  5. The existing condenser water risers had to remain; it was impractical to replace them due to service interruption to tenants, time constraints and costs.
  6. The chilled water temperature difference could not be changed because of existing air handling equipment.
Besides modernizing the chiller plant, the existing chilled water distribution required modification to allow for changeover from the old to a new plant and to accommodate a single plant located in the basement. Since in the original configuration the system was split into high and low rise systems, the lower mechanical equipment cooling coils, pumps, etc. would not be able to handle the increased static head when the upper MERs were connected. This problem was resolved by providing a "break" in the form of a plate heat exchanger on the 10th floor MER.
Primary and secondary pumping were studied for the new chilled water distribution. Our studies indicated that primary pumping was considerably simpler with less expensive first cost and operating cost than primary/secondary pumping.
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