Commercial boiler replacement, Haringey, London
When building services consultancy, Beveridge Associates, won a competitive tender for the replacement of a 1990s heating system at Wood Green Library in North London, the choice of modern, efficient heating technology was the easy part! The 1MW project for Haringey Council provided its contractor, commercial heating systems specialists GetFix, with an installation deadline of just eight weeks, a commitment to maintain the supply of heating and hot water to the building throughout the works, and challenging site access.
“We carry out a lot of work with Haringey Council and help maintain a lot of their schools, commercial buildings and, in recent months, even the Council’s own offices,” says GetFix’s Mechanical Director Oliver Ware.
“But this project required a particularly quick turnaround considering the extent of the work required, as well as ensuring the library was never without heating or hot water. For a building that is open to the public seven days a week, this definitely required a high level of communication and logistical planning.”
Heavy duty arrangements
From June to September 2021, the library’s third floor plant room was the focus of activity, one of the first tasks being to install a temporary boiler to help ease the transition. Specialist scaffolding was designed to sustain four tonnes. A crane with counterweight pitched on the street outside moved equipment to and from the building, all within a busy, commercial part of London. An entire wall was removed in order to facilitate the upgrade to the plant room.
The project’s contract administrator, Alex Foreman from Beveridge Associates, had specified four 240 kW Viessmann Vitocrossal 100 gas condensing boilers as part of the tender. GetFix was chosen from five competing bidders to install the system, which was designed to feed the air handling units and radiator circuit throughout the three-storey building.
“Beveridge Associates specified the Vitocrossal units to heat the library and operate separately to the hot water system,” explains Ware. “Due to the nature of its use, the library’s hot water demand is significantly lower than its space heating requirements; a system doing both would not have been as efficient.”
As part of the upgrade, Ware and his team also replaced gas-fired water heaters, control system, pump sets and all the pipework in the plantroom at Wood Green.
A modern update
Installed as a cascade system, the four Vitocrossal 100 units replaced two cast-iron boilers. Each features Viessmann’s Inox-Crossal heat exchanger with MatriX cylinder burner. A vastly modern alternative to the 1990s models they replaced, the Vitocrossals’ burners boast a long service life as their stainless steel MatriX gauze is resistant to high temperature loads, while the boilers’ modulation range of up to 1:5 ensures long burner runtimes and economical energy consumption.
