Such was the case for our recent project in Corvallis, Oregon. The goal was to create a new boiler plant that would have greater efficiencies and provide a higher level or redundancy to their system.
First, we had to create a temporary heating water system during construction to maintain system operation. We removed a HP and HP boiler and left one HP boiler in place which was still worth hanging on to as a redundant backup boiler. We installed four new HP Bryan boilers with Limpsfield Autoflame burners and upgraded their entire flue system.
Their heating hot water pumping system was upgraded with a cleaner install of pumps with modern flow control that maintained their pump redundancy, and subsequently allowed the facility to eliminate their antiquated system bypass. Their backup fuel oil pump system was also upgraded. We replaced their makeup air unit and added a separate supply fan to ensure that it carried a level of redundancy to match the rest of the heating hot water plant. All of these upgrades set the facility up with enhanced control, higher reliability, and improved system efficiency.
Sounds easy, right? Well, in reality, this project presented many conceptual and logistical hurdles along the way. To start, we were working with a mechanical room that had many kinds of systems in the space which could not be removed, shifted, or interrupted at any time during construction. There was a lot of piping, conduit, duct, equipment, and structure in the way, and the mechanical room was also buried within the bowels of the facility, which constrained the removal of large, old equipment and installation of new.
The new flue was difficult to integrate because there were so many obstructions within the room to navigate, and we also had to feed the new flue system through multiple stories of an abandoned chimney stack. On top of all of that, this is an active heating hot water plant serving a working system which both needed to remain operational and maintain redundancy during all of construction!
