Demountable chillers: Geoclima’s customized solutions to overcome all types of obstacles
One of the founding values in the history of Geoclima is customization, the ability to design bespoke solutions to meet customer needs. These may concern particular requests in terms of performance or energy efficiency, but sometimes they also have to deal with the site of the installation and any critical installation issues.
During our 25 years of activity, our team of designers has often found itself facing challenges of this type, always managing to find a satisfactory solution, without compromising performance and reliability.
This is the case, for example, of the renovation project of the air conditioning system at the Library at the University in Crakow, one of the most prestigious libraries in Poland. This project set several challenges, both in terms of design and installation. First of all, the new chiller had to be designed to integrate with the existing air conditioning system. On the new chiller, positioned inside the technical room, radial fans were installed, so that the air was sucked in and discharged to the outside through the existing pipes. The new unit – a 300 kW air-cooled Turbomiser – was installed indoor, in the technical room underground, where it is very difficult to access and the transport and handling of the completely assembled machine is not possible. To respond to this problem, the new chiller was designed to be completely demounted outside, transported through narrow corridors and finally reassembled inside the technical room.
Another interesting case concerns the DoubleTree Hotel in London. This is a luxury high end hotel situated in the heart of the English capital. Geoclima was commissioned to design a chiller for the air conditioning system of new suites built in the attic. The difficulties inherent in this project were essentially two: first of all, the chiller had to be positioned near the new rooms and therefore had to guarantee very low noise levels during operation. But above all, the hotel is surrounded by busy roads and therefore it was impossible to use a crane to position the unit. To overcome this problem, our designers have developed a bespoke solution with a completely demountable air-cooled chiller and whose components, including the hydraulic unit, could be transported by hand to the roof of the hotel.
Also in the case of the roof installation of the Ullsteinhaus in Berlin, we had to solve “traffic problems”, so to speak. In fact, due to traffic problems, a crane of adequate size could not be used to lift our chiller. Therefore, we decided to design a Circlemiser that could be demounted into portions that did not exceed 1600 kg, thus using a smaller crane without blocking traffic.
These are some of the examples of how our dynamic and versatile approach can be an added value and solve critical issues that with standard solutions would remain insurmountable obstacles.