DoubleTree Hotel – London

Background

A luxury high end hotel situated in Southampton Row, London, has had a multimillion pound refit including the addition of several penthouse suites in the attic and executive rooms in the basement. For the air conditioning system that serves these rooms it was necessary to install a new chiller.

Challenges

The project had to face several logistical challenges related to the location of the building: first of all, the hotel is surrounded by busy roads and therefore it was impossible to use a crane to position the unit. Furthermore, the chiller could only be installed on the roof of the building adjacent to the penthouse suites and this meant that the machine had to be ultra low noise when operating.

Project

Our designers, together with our distributor Cooltherm, developed a bespoke solution with a completely demountable air-cooled chiller and whose components, including the hydraulic unit, could be manually transported to the roof. Furthermore, a combination of technological solutions was adopted to guarantee the adequate levels of silence: custom ‘in frame’ acoustic enclosures combined with scroll acoustic compressor hoods, low pressure drop condenser coils, and EC condenser fans running at a reduced speed but employing adaptive extreme ambient fan speed control.

Results

Once installed, the chiller was commissioned into operation and the sound levels were tested: the noise produced fell below the maximum required level of 51 dB (A) at 10 meters, and this without compromising the performance, the efficiency and reliability of the chiller even in extreme weather conditions.