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Warehouses, production floors, kitchens and vehicle bays
Most of the working buildings in this city were put up before anybody expected them to be cooled, and a good number have a roof full of equipment that nobody has mapped. That is where we start.
Find it, measure it, map it, write it down
Every unit located, identified by model and serial number, and matched to the area it actually serves — which on a building that has changed tenants twice is often not what anybody assumes. Dead and abandoned plant gets marked as dead.
Then the measurements: airflow and static pressure, refrigerant charge, economiser operation where one is fitted, filter condition and the pressure drop across it, belt and bearing condition, condensate drainage, and combustion on gas heat.
And on any building with a heat complaint, loggers: placed at the height people work at, left for a week, and reported as a graph of the working day rather than a single number taken at the moment we happened to visit.
Four kinds of premises, four different problems
Storage and distribution
Heat in a tall building is a stratification problem before it is a capacity problem. The warm air is at the roof and the people are on the floor, and cooling the whole volume is both expensive and frequently unnecessary. Destratification fans, high-volume low-speed fans, ventilation and spot cooling at the pick faces will often move the numbers further than plant would, for a fraction of the money. We will measure both and give you the figures side by side.
Production and workshops
Here the heat is generated inside the building, by machinery, ovens, compressors or process equipment, and that changes the answer completely. Extraction at the source beats cooling the room almost every time. Radiant heat near a hot process is also a different problem from air temperature, and it needs to be measured as its own thing rather than folded into a thermostat reading.
Commercial kitchens
Make-up air balanced against hood exhaust, measured rather than assumed. A kitchen out of balance pulls conditioned air from the dining room and the street, makes the front of house impossible to keep comfortable and makes the line unbearable. We work on the air. We do not clean hoods and we do not certify fire suppression, and we will tell you who does.
Vehicle bays and offices above
A bay with the door open is being asked to condition the street, which is a schedule and air-curtain conversation rather than a bigger-unit conversation. The office above it usually has the opposite problem and shares a thermostat with something it has nothing in common with. Splitting the zones is often the entire fix.
What we do in premises
- Written plant survey
Every unit found, identified, measured and mapped to what it serves, with abandoned plant marked as such.
- Temperature and humidity logging
Loggers placed at working height, left for a week, reported as a record of the working day.
- Packaged unit repair and replacement
Repair diagnosed and costed first. Replacement sized from the building as it is used now.
- Ventilation and destratification
Fans, extraction and make-up air, measured before and after so the change is a number rather than an impression.
- Spot and process cooling
Cooling the people and the equipment that need it rather than the whole volume, where the building makes that the sensible answer.
- Planned maintenance and records
Scheduled visits, the same readings each time, written specifically enough to satisfy a landlord, a tenant or an inspector.
Work we turn down
- Compliance certification of any kind. We give you dated readings. Whether they meet an obligation is for a safety professional to say.
- Heat illness prevention plans and staff training. Required of employers, and not a heating and cooling job.
- Central chiller plant and cooling towers. A different discipline with different tickets, and we are not going to learn it on your building.
- Proprietary building management system programming. We will work with the controls in front of us and tell you what a schedule is doing. Programming a manufacturer-locked system belongs to whoever holds the licence.
- Commercial refrigeration. Walk-ins, display cases and ice machines are adjacent and are not the same trade.
- Hood cleaning and fire suppression. Separate licensed jobs. We do the air balance around the hood.
- Process exhaust engineering for hazardous substances. Where extraction is a health and safety engineering question rather than a comfort one, it needs an industrial hygienist and we will say so.
Tell us the building
Roughly how many units are on the roof, what the floor is used for, and where the complaints come from. 1406 E Alondra Blvd, Compton. Monday to Friday, 7am to 4.30pm.