The hotel at the Oxfordshire Golf & Spa in the glorious Oxfordshire countryside comprises of 46 executive bedrooms, and 4 luxury suites.
When a new general manager took over the site, he inherited poorly performing, unreliable heat recovery systems with abnormally high repair costs.
The incumbent air conditioning contractor had walked away from the site, and as the new general manager had used Ref-Sol in the past, he called on us to help him out.
What we found on face value was eye watering. Dead compressors, refrigerant bottles, oil samples and acid test kits scattered across the roof of each bedroom wing. Not to mention the 2 large core driers sticking out of the units!
Each wing of 25 rooms had a master/slave set up with 25 ducted fan coils and single branch selector boxes over 3 floors that were installed 12 years ago.
Every time the site suffered a catastrophic failure, it would take out the whole wing. Something that the client wanted to get away from in the future.
Following a thorough validation and monitoring of both systems, we found them to be undersized for the application and badly contaminated with acid and foreign bodies.
A program to “clean up”, pressure test, evacuate and charge refrigerant to the correct weight into the systems was put into place.
The systems were then re-commissioned so the client could get some benefit from them for the foreseeable future.
After just over a year of “nursing” the systems along at the customers request to keep the hotel operating with heating and cooling, we were then able to put a proposal and plan in place to fully replace the unreliable and inefficient equipment.
Our brief was pretty straight forward. Remove the old systems and pipe work, and install one system per floor, correctly sized, and all while the hotel could continue to operate and still be able to sell 100% of their rooms if required, at the end of each day. Also, no cranes on site to remove the old condensing units from the roof, or new back onto the roof. A challenge in itself that we felt confident we could achieve and take head on.
Through consultation with the customer, Ref-Sol engaged Cool Designs Ltd to come up with a design to suit the customers’ requirement using Toshiba VRF Heat Recovery Systems for their 2 x 3 floor bedroom wings.
For each floor a Toshiba MMY-MAP0806FT8P 3 pipe Super Heat Recovery condensing unit was selected, with every room having a slim ducted fan coil unit, single flow selector box (in corridors), and compact wired remote controller.
All systems were connected to Toshiba’s Smart Touch Controller.
A schedule of work and timescales were agreed for completion of each wing. This was just 9 weeks per wing using only a team of 2 engineers, as the customer requested that the operational hotel wasn’t flooded with labour when guests are present.
The old condensing units, pipe work, fan coils, selector boxes were decommissioned and removed from site.
New condensing unit positions and pipe routes were agreed to suit the site layout.
Working to the strict deadline, we proceeded work on site. Our outstanding team of just 2 engineers communicated daily with the GM, Maintenance Manager and Housekeeping Manager to make sure that all party’s were fully aware of the days work ahead, so that the guests experience wouldn’t be affected.
Wing B was the first to be completed and handed over 9 weeks to the day, and the same was achieved with wing A.
Although there were many challenges that can be expected along the way on an operational site, Ref-Sol were able to overcome these and still deliver the project both on time and within budget to a very satisfied customer.
