Client: Mersey Care NHS Foundation
Project: Site Wide Decarbonisation
Project Value: £2.3m
The Merseycare Decarbonisation Scheme is a Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme (PSDS) that the Kimpton MEP Projects team has delivered alongside Mitie Technical FM.
The work was across four individual sites within the Merseycare estate. It includes Moss House, The Life Rooms, Leigh Moss Hospital, and the largest element of the job was at Rathbone Hospital.
The end result of our work across the sites was to ultimately remove the use on gas-fired plant, and where required, upgrade the associated electrical infrastructure to enable the new systems to deliver reliable heating and hot water across the whole site.
We will look at what work has been involved so far with each of the sites in turn.
Moss House:
Moss House, in Garston, Liverpool offers adult community mental health services. It’s an office style space with a conventional gas heating system that was approaching end of life. We have installed a VRF heating system throughout the site and the gas supply is now redundant.
Life Rooms:
The Life Rooms in Walton Vale provides a wide range of free, short courses to increase recognition, understanding and self-management on symptoms such as anxiety, depression, psychosis, self-esteem and much more.
The building is rather grand with a large, pillared entrance and has traditional cast iron radiators throughout. The challenge was to retain this a much as possible whilst integrating ASHP technology which comes with slightly lower design water temperatures than the old style radiators would like. To overcome the issue with design water temperatures we have installed a water to water (W2W) heat exchanger that works in conjunction with the new Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP) unit.
Supplementary electric heating has also been installed in a few previously unheated areas to ensure a consistent level of comfort throughout the building.
Leigh Moss Hospital:
The team at Leigh Moss Hospital in Knotty Ash support people with dementia of any age and people with mental health problems aged 70 and over, who are residents of Liverpool and Kirkby. Fern Ward provides a 16 bedded mixed gender dementia care unit which includes Activities of Daily Living (ADL) kitchens, activity spaces as well as all single occupancy rooms.
The site is quite discretely hidden away off the main road and is a quiet and calm place for people who need constant care. We had to work methodically around this requirement to replace pipework and install a new ASHP to replace the gas heating system.
Builders work was also part of our brief to ensure that we left the site in good order, fully finished and looking consistent for the residents, who may struggle with change.
Rathbone Hospital:
This was by far the biggest element of the overall project as the scale of the Old Swan site is considerably bigger than all the others combined. Rathbone Hospital is a rehabilitation service within Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, specialising in mental health care, including a low-secure mental health unit and services for individuals with psychosis.
The key brief here again was to remove all of the gas fired heating & hot water plant throughout the site. By creating and fitting out a new centralised external with large Mitsubishi Air Source Heat Pumps, we have again booted the water temperature using water to water heat exchangers which then distribute the heating throughout via new underground pipework to the various additional plant rooms around the site. We have also installed further localised ASHPs to provide hot water resilience to the plantrooms of the critical areas.
With the growth of the electrical requirement on site, the DNO electricity provider has also installed a new electrical substation, and we have installed all the new LV panels throughout the site that are directly linked to the new ASHP plant & ancillary equipment.
The project has been a full design and build appointment across all four of the sites and as you can see from the overviews above, this has been approached with a ‘best fit for the site’ approach, rather than a ‘one size fits all’ solution.
The work has not only supported the Trust’s drive to net zero, but will also help reduce ongoing running costs across the estate too.
Kimpton have been delivering renewable solutions and heat pump technology since the early 1970’s. This 50+ years of experience counts when it comes to creating solutions that don’t just decarbonise but also deliver warm comfortable spaces with sensible ongoing running costs – Critical in any residential or care environment.
The project was managed by Paul Cooper, MEP Projects Divisional Director, who said “It was a really interesting project, as there were a lot of disparate elements that we were pulling together to make the whole better than the sum of the parts.
We are seeing more and more of these projects now and the chance to the review the whole site at once does bring much greater efficiency in delivery, that will result in a better, more coherent end product.”
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