The brief was to install a complete air conditioning system within a very prestigious basement gallery in a three-storey building in Central London to provide comfort cooling and heating. In this particular instance, the external condenser units were to be roof-mounted.
The gallery is divided into distinct and ‘themed‘areas and comprises of furnishings, lighting, objet d’art and paintings. Therefore, a very important part of the brief was to keep wall space available for potential display.
A total of 5 split systems were installed with the internal fan coil units being under-ceiling suspended due to solid concrete flooring / ceiling construction.
This installation had to be of the highest quality, due to the prestigious nature of the site, with the need for the air conditioning units to be as discrete as possible. All of the visual impact in this gallery must be focused on the exhibits and articles themselves.
In order to minimise the visual impact of the installation, the interconnecting pipe work between the internal fan coils and the condensers were concealed within the gallery area by running said pipe work inside the existing duct work of the ventilation system.
In addition, a particular difficult area of the installation was due to there being no acceptable means of routing the pipe work on the exterior of the building. The question of how to get from the basement to the roof was addressed by running the pipe work internally up through the building via the service lift shaft.
The next major problem to overcome was how to get the condenser system on to the roof to allow ventilation of the entire air conditioning network. Normally, large plant work would be placed in one area of the roof. However, the structural integrity of the roof area was in question, which meant that the load would have to be spread rather than focused in one area.
The selection of 5 split systems allowed us to manually (very hard work indeed!) carry each condenser unit to the roof area and mount them in a more widespread area. The other advantage of using the more compact split systems was to allow us to manoeuvre the more compact units up through the three flights of stairs.
The result of this (in our view) clever solution was to supply a very high quality air conditioning and heating system in an equally high quality environment.
The units used in this particular installation were Daikin, which are considered to be the best in the business and also amongst the quietest air conditioning units available.
The comment from the client was that ‘In an environment where valuable items are displayed and sold, in particular in Central London, it is very important that this environment is as comfortable as it possibly can be as the potential client may take a considerable amount of time to make a choice when purchasing. It is therefore vitally important that the client is made as comfortable as possible’.