ENERGY IN HOSPITALS & HEALTHCARE Cooling upgrade for Orpington hospital


Enhancing energy monitoring in the operating theatre


Like many NHS facilities, St George’s Hospital in Tooting, London is under pressure to deliver adequate, efficient clinical services. After securing funding from the local authority, the hospital’s team enlisted multiple specialists to help it improve energy consumption and asset performance. Among these was IACONNECTS, a monitoring solutions integrator, which supplied wireless sensor technology to capture various data points from the building management system (BMS). Operating theatres are among the most


energy-intensive areas in hospitals, consuming three to six times more energy than clinical wards. St George’s Hospital, which performs over 130,000 operations annually, wanted to capture all the available environmental data from 31 operating theatres and augment any missing data sets by installing control and monitoring devices. “St George’s needed a solution that


would establish with the existing BMS and fill any gaps in environmental data,” explained Dave Lister, solutions consultant at IAConnects. “Our approach was to deploy over 500 wired and wireless sensing devices using LoRaWAN technology to


Controls upgrade for Royal Preston


monitor key environmental metrics.” The hospital’s team can now access


over 250 data points from the BMS, including temperature, humidity, CO₂, total volatile organic compounds (TVOC), illuminance (Lux), air pressure and occupancy. The occupancy data enables automatic adjustments to HVAC systems, such as activating Set Back and Ramp Up modes. Meanwhile, hospital staff can monitor power consumption using wireless current transformers and BMS data. Captured data is integrated into a


middleware platform, MobiusFlow, which normalises and aggregates the information for use by Trust stakeholders. The platform allows for real-time analytics and automated responses, ensuring efficient energy management. “The first phase has delivered significant benefits,” reports Lister. “These include energy savings exceeding £350k, and a return on investment is expected in under two years. Meanwhile, by optimising the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems based on occupancy, the solution reduces stress on equipment, extending asset lifecycles.” Building on this success, the project is


expanding into additional areas, including anaesthesia feeder rooms, with plans to monitor nitrous oxide systems and explore AI applications for predictive maintenance


and environmental-patient data analysis. ■ iaconnects.co.uk/solutions/energy- monitoring/


Hospital The Royal Preston Hospital provides a full range of acute services for the people of Preston, from 24-hour accident and emergency facilities to high dependency and coronary care units and maternity services. The trust also provides a range of specialist services for the wider population of Lancashire and South Cumbria, including neurosurgery and neurology, oncology and complex cancer surgery and renal services. The hospital comprises 50 buildings and a total area of 114,596m2. It has 1000 beds


32


and serves over 1.2m patients annually. The BMS is linked by a hospital-wide Ethernet network, which ensures real time monitoring of all buildings. The annual energy bill stands at £3.4m.


The installation of the ABB Cylon BMS


solution has enabled the hospital to gradually replace its existing network of controls with a more flexible and cost effective solution, allowing the effective implementation of its energy management policy. Surgeons and other key staff now can


locally control temperature and humidity in critical areas such as operating theatres and X-ray, while system supervisors have overall control of all HVAC systems in the hospital and the remotely located clinics. Both Ethernet enabled UnitronUC32


ICS COOL ENERGY has successfully completed a critical cooling system upgrade at the Princess Royal University Hospital in Orpington. By installing temporary chillers during the refurbishment of the permanent system, the company has helped to ensure uninterrupted cooling for the hospital’s operating theatre and essential medical equipment.


The hospital was dealing with outdated


cooling infrastructure and needed a reliable and efficient replacement system to maintain precise temperatures for essential medical equipment, sensitive medications and hospital environments. The chiller plant’s location on the hospital roof posed logistical challenges for dismantling the old equipment and transporting and installing the new ones. Additionally, providing a temporary cooling capacity of 1.8 MW was crucial to ensure seamless hospital operations during the refurbishment. Given the logistical challenges posed


by the rooftop location and due to the restrictions imposed on crane usage, the consultant's specification deemed it necessary to flat-pack all the chillers for removal and installation. The construction company, Vinci, engineered an extensive scaffold from the ground-level compound to the roof, incorporating an integral hoist to facilitate the positioning of the equipment on site. To maintain uninterrupted operation of the hospital’s critical systems and operating theatres throughout the project, ICS Cool Energy leveraged its decades-long expertise in temporary cooling solutions. With a selection of 500kW high-performance chillers readily


available for hire and rapid deployment, the team quickly delivered and installed the three chillers as temporary support. The complexity of the temporary install


was further amplified by the need for ‘hot tapping’ – attaching to a pipeline without depressurising or disrupting normal operations – which was crucial to putting the hire chillers in place and providing immediate and reliable cooling during the transition. For the final new cooling system, the


team selected three 600kW HVAC chillers featuring R513A low GWP refrigerant, meeting the hospital’s demand for capacity, performance and efficiency, as well as future proofing the equipment for the duration of its lifetime The meticulous flat-packing process


involved disassembling the chillers into their component parts, starting with the removal of fans and panelling, and safely extracting refrigerant from the system. Each piece was carefully labelled to ensure accurate reassembly. After reassembly, the system was recharged with refrigerant, tested and commissioned following the completion of pipefitting, fluid filling, electrical supplies and ducting. The old chillers were flat packed and taken down the same way. Joe Murray, project manager at ICS Cool


Energy, comments: “This project was particularly challenging, with numerous logistical hurdles, but despite tight deadlines and unforeseen obstacles, we delivered the systems successfully. From beginning to end, it was a collaborative effort, and we streamlined the process by providing a single point of contact for the


customer.” ■ www.icscoolenergy.com


systems and older Unitron 2000 systems are integrated with a single supervisor system on the hospital IT network, while the system enables the estates department to manage and alter the system themselves without constant reliance on manufacturer assistance.


The ABB Cylon system has been installed by Nobbs & Jones (an ABB Cylon Approved System Integrator) in a variety of new buildings, including a medical rehab unit, education and training wing, obstetrics & gynaecology building and a pharmacy. The Trust’s local clinics are linked to the main hospital buildings using a Wide Area Network (WAN). The whole system is managed from three supervisors in the estates office on the same Ethernet network. A range of energy saving measures have also been successfully implemented, including the use of occupancy sensors to step down heating levels when rooms are


not in use. ■ new.abb.com/buildings


EIBI | MAY 2025


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36