HVAC SYSTEMS
Innovation means plenty of choice for specifiers
Dave Palmer, General manager for the UK and Ireland at temperature control specialist, ICS Cool Energy, takes a look at some of the key heating and cooling demands on hospitals and other healthcare facilities, and at how these can be met in a sustainable and efficient way. He also discusses the benefits of temporary hire of heating and cooling equipment – an area in which the company has particular expertise.
In hospitals and other healthcare facilities, the right temperature, humidity, and air quality are all essential to ensure comfortable and healthy conditions for patients, staff, and visitors. Meanwhile, a constant supply of hygienic hot water is essential for a wealth of hospital functions – from patient bathing to the operation of laundry and sterile services departments. With growing demand to reduce carbon emissions, the healthcare estates and healthcare engineering personnel responsible for ensuring that such parameters are met, however, are simultaneously under pressure to ensure that heating, cooling, and hot water systems are running as efficiently and sustainably as possible. Innovation in heating and
cooling technology enables such personnel to choose from a wide variety of products and solutions. These include, but are not limited to, large chillers for building temperature control, close temperature control chillers for medical equipment and hospital server rooms, and a fleet of electric, diesel, and gas-fired hire boilers for emergency hot water provision and additional capacity needs. In our view, healthcare estates and healthcare engineering personnel seeking the optimal way to navigate successfully through all the options that the market has to offer should partner and work with industry experts that can bring to bear extensive experience, specifically in the healthcare sector. Such ‘partners’ should have the expertise and experience, as well as the technical knowledge, to provide, say, an NHS Trust or private healthcare provider’s Estates & Facilities team with meaningful advice, as well as
to offer a full spectrum of services and solutions – from the design of cooling and heating systems to short and long- term turnkey hire solutions – all bundled together and backed by support from an in-house team of technical applications experts.
In all cases, whether it’s establishing
contingency plans or discussing replacement strategies for ageing equipment, Estates and Facilities managers need to keep abreast of the
latest innovations and technologies that can help them efficiently meet their temperature control requirements.
Don’t waste – repurpose the heat Repurposing energy by integrating cooling and heating systems is an opportunity often overlooked. Hospitals require all- year round cooling in surgical spaces, for example to keep vital equipment such as MRI scanners running, and to maintain the right temperature and humidity levels in cold storage for multiple purposes. If we equip the building with a heat recovery chiller, it will generate hot water as a by-product of the chilled water system. The system can provide heating when there is a demand, while using, or when not simultaneously required, storing, the cooling energy through use of ice banks. This helps to connect the heating and cooling demands within a 24-hour span. Modern installations can reduce or eliminate the need to run boilers by using heat pump technology that can produce hot water at temperatures of up to 80 °C at a fraction of the cost – and when cooling is required at the same time – even for free.
ICS Cool Energy says that all its chillers are manufactured to industry standards, ‘with the highest quality components, offering energy efficiency and unrivalled control’.
36 Health Estate Journal March 2022
When emergency strikes There are, of course, a significant number of critical healthcare applications that rely on precise temperature control, and any failure or disruption has consequences for the comfort and well-being of patients and staff. If disaster strikes and a temperature control system fails, being able to rely on a pre-arranged contingency plan for both cooling and heating systems can be the difference between just hours, rather than weeks, of downtime. The right expert partner can
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