Air
Comfort Corporation Installs New Air Conditioning System in Historic
Civic Opera Building
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Tenants at the Civic Opera Building are breathing easier because
of a new environmentally-friendly air conditioning system installed
by Air Comfort Corporation. And the installation was completed
with a minimum of disturbance to the occupants of the building,
which spans an entire block of Wacker Drive, between Madison and
Washington streets in downtown Chicago.
The first of two new 1,200-ton Carrier chillers to cool the building
was installed in 1993. Air Comfort Corporation installed the second
1,200-ton unit in late 1996. In order to facilitate the process,
six concrete slabs were removed from the sidewalk on the Wacker
Drive side of the building. Another six slabs were removed from
the floor immediately beneath those six, and a third set from
the sub-basement level below. The chiller was then lowered into
the hole and transported through a passageway to the basement.
Although Wacker Drive was closed during the process, Air Comfort
Corporation Vice President Tim Smerz noted that “it was
done at night time and it was put back in the morning.”
Consequently, building tenants weren’t inconvenienced by
the process; it’s likely many were unaware that the installation
had occurred overnight.
The Carrier units that Air Comfort installed utilize a refrigerant
called 134A. Smerz said that this new refrigerant is “environmentally
friendly and doesn’t have a chlorine base to it like the
environmentally-harmful chloro-fluorocarbon (CFC) refrigerant.
R-134A uses a hydro-fluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerant; it doesn’t
harm the ozone layer like a CFC does.”
The new chillers also use pump-out vessels to help minimize the
loss of refrigerants. The refrigerants used by the unit are pumped
and recycled into vessels for storage during off-season months.
The system set up for the Civic Opera Building is environmentally
friendly in other ways, too. One of the most significant is the
fact that the units’ condensers utilize Chicago River water,
which saves both fresh water and energy. The water is fed through
the system, then returned to the river.
“It’s an extremely efficient and effective medium
for cooling,” Smerz said. “Normally with chillers
like that, you would need to cool down the condenser water by
having a large cooling tower on the roof or just wasting water
by running city water through it and into a drain. What we are
able to do is take river water, which has the ideal temperature
condition, and put it right through the condenser, and then right
back into the river.”
Air Comfort Corporation also installed new plate and frame heat
exchangers located on the 23rd floor to cool the top floors of
the building. This eliminated the need for two 160-ton chillers
and cooling towers previously used for cooling these areas.
Smerz added that because the water runs through a purifying medium,
“it gets back to the river in better condition than the
way it entered the building. It’s very energy-efficient
and very effective.”
Air Comfort Corporation is also working on a program to systematically
replace outdated coil cooling/heating exchangers with efficient
plate exchangers to further reduce the cost of running the air
conditioning system.
An additional step is being taken by the building’s staff
to create a healthy working environment. All the windows in the
building were replaced with double Thermopane glazed, operable
aluminum windows. This will allow tenants to let fresh air in,
weather permitting, a unique feature for high-rises, which are
usually tightly sealed. Tenants also are able to control conditions
in their offices through individual thermostats which generates
additional savings.
The building’s own engineering staff, under the direction
of chief engineer, Mike Kenny, will be handling the day-to-day
maintenance of the two Carrier units. Air Comfort Corporation
will handle repairs and do annual winter maintenance of the machines.
The air conditioning update project handled by Air Comfort Corporation
is part of a three-year multi-million dollar renovation of the
historic Civic Opera Building, which was designed by the architectural
firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, under the direction
of General Electric founder and first president Samuel Insull.
The building officially opened on November 4, 1929, ten days after
the stock market crash.
Current Civic Opera Building owner Steve Fifield has guided the
building through significant improvements and upgrades. “The
building’s ownership and management have taken a far-sighted
approach to these projects, positioning the property to move into
the 21st century,” said Smerz. Noel Daly was Air Comfort’s
design engineer on the project.
The 45-story building is over 550 feet high and contains 20,800,000
cubic feet of space. The Carrier chillers are serving an approximately
850,000-square foot portion of the building, that is primarily
dedicated to office space. |
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