Enlightened property developers, owners, and managers are taking seriously the looming steep rise in energy and maintenance costs by examining their existing installations such as lighting and HVAC, a major consumer of electrical power. One such example is the Vukile Property Fund who, together with managing agent Broll Property Group, have accessed the expertise of consulting engineering group Royal HaskoningDHV (formerly SSI) to carry out a HVAC plant room upgrade of their Suncardia property in Arcadia, Pretoria – a project that will save the owners an estimated R400 000 per annum in combined energy and maintenance costs.

Project manager and principle associate mechanical engineer Casper Vos explains the details of the project. “Royal HaskoningDHV – then SSI – designed the original HVAC and chiller plant installation for the Suncardia building in 1989, one of several we have designed for this client.

“The scope consists of replacing the three existing York chillers with a new air cooled chiller which includes demolishing 24 glycol filled ice storage tanks, two cooling towers and replacing four centrifugal pumps, a heat exchanger, +/- 400 m of pipe work and the rebalancing of the entire chilled water system. “The three York chillers used to serve the ice storage system but that was decommissioned a couple of years ago due to maintenance issues. A water-cooled screw chiller was installed then to replace the ice storage system. This upgrade will see the new air cooled chiller installed in series with the existing water-cooled chiller to achieve the required cooling capacity” explained Casper.

In order to maximise the efficiency of the new equipment, the existing plant was virtually remodelled in a BIM (Building Information Modelling) environment. The aim of this approach was to simulate the entire system’s water flow, which helps dramatically to understand the complexity of the existing system and therefore optimise design decisions whilst accurately quantifying the amount of demolition work that has to be done.

“All our design decisions are driven by sustainability and maximising efficiencies of plant and equipment” said Casper, who is one of several Green Star accredited professionals employed by Royal HaskoningDHV.

“This upgrade will result in the client achieving substantial electrical and maintenance cost savings on the HVAC installation, estimated to achieve a total project payback within 10 years, whilst radically reducing the plant room size, equipment and operational costs” he concluded.

Site work is scheduled to commence March 2013 with a completion date of August 2013.