Hospitals and Pharmaceutical
Two facts make it crucial to take the specification of HVAC equipment in healthcare facilities seriously.
First, hospital patients are particularly susceptible to infection from airborne contamination because their immune systems are often compromised due to illness.
Secondly, ventilation plays a decisive role in affecting air concentrations of pathogens such as fungal spores and other hospital-acquired infections, and these have a major impact on infection rates.
Medical air conditioning and ventilation
Medical air conditioning and ventilation systems must not only deliver appropriate redundancy and availability, but also keep the total cost of ownership as low as possible. To achieve this, it is important to select the right technologies.
LH-plc can help with this because the company has a wealth of experience and expertise in the healthcare sector that has accrued over more than 30 years.
Hospital chiller replacements & upgrades
LH-plc and sister company Klima-Therm have worked together to deliver pioneering chiller replacements and upgrades for several major leading healthcare facilities around the UK. This has resulted in significant benefits, not only in terms of saved time, effort, and money, but also – far more importantly – in saved lives.
One important example of LH-plc’s involvement in a major healthcare project is the 521-bed Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, London.
Here, the chilled water system was served by two dual circuit packaged air-cooled water chillers with remotely located associated pumps and strainers which needed replacement.
The available enclosure space was insufficient to allow equal capacity chillers to be installed and also resolve the air-recirculation issues that were preventing the existing chillers from operating reliably and efficiently.
LH-plc and its sister company Klima-Therm revised the chiller design to incorporate within the available space an innovative solution that offers the 1.06MW cooling capacity required. It achieved this using a pair of 531kW Rhoss screw compressor chillers with remote Althermo condensers and separate Lowara pumps.
To maintain cooling while work progressed, a pair of temporary chillers were hired and crane lifts, changeover operation and equipment commissioning were completed at night to avoid any disruption to the smooth running of the hospital.
The project demanded exacting attention to detail to ensure that the plant fitted in the confined space available, with sufficient room for service and maintenance.
LH-plc’s many years’ of operating in cramped inner-city projects of this kind coupled with the excellent space-saving design of the Rhoss equipment, enabled the company to deliver a high-quality solution befitting this prestigious building.