Presidia Building : Paul Kruger Street : Pretoria
The new owners agreed to a complete refurbishment of the chilled water plant, to include new chilled water generators and the upgrading of the building’s primary cooling plant. At the same time, the chilled water air-handling units, having been refurbished some 4 years earlier, were fully serviced and brought up to good working order.
The primary cooling plant consisted of your evaporative cooling plants. These tempured the fresh air component to each set of air-handling units below, providing a degree of “free” cooling when outdoor conditions were favourable.
Unfortunately these had long since been taken out of commmission due to age, corrosion, lack of maintenance, etc.
In their place, new Lennox Direct expansion Thermodynamic units have now been installed to provide optimum efficiency and green principles.
The existing water-cooled reciprocating chllers were both replaced with air-cooled chillers of lesser capacity due to the assistance of the Thermodynamic units. At the same time the primary and secondary chilled water pumps were replaced with direct-drive inline centrifugal pumps to reduce energy consumption further.
Integral to the entire system, a state of the art Building Management System has been installed to control and monitor the airconditioning performance, to include the ground floor retail areas.
In this regard, the original, long obsolete water-cooled packaged units and cooling tower system has now been replaced with a Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) system with the full heat reclaim option, to serve each individual shop and restaurant.
The next planned phase of the project replacement of the project will be the replacement of the floors chilled water air-handling units and associated pipework.
Completion of this final phase will ensure a further 30 years of acceptable airconditioning for the building.
