Rathbone Hospital Decarbonisation

• Health

Rathbone Hospital Decarbonisation

Client: Mersey Care NHS Foundation
Project: Site Wide Decarbonisation
Project Value: £2.8m
Project Manager: Paul Cooper

Overview

Rathbone Hospital is part of Merseycare NHS Foundation Trust and specialises in mental health care as well as operating a low secure mental health unit. The Trust operates from five sites across Liverpool and has a mix of older and newer buildings. The heating and ventilation plant is therefore of mixed ages and efficiencies and our brief is to work our way through the sites, replacing old and inefficient plant, with low carbon alternatives.

This will not only help with the drive to net zero by the Trust, but will also help reduce ongoing running costs across the estate too.

Our work

Our work involves the replacement of all of the gas-fired heating and hot water provision across the site, replacing the boilers with heat pumps. Because the new heating system will run on electricity instead of gas, we’ll be upgrading the 1000 kVa High Voltage supplies, bringing the power from the grid into the transformer on site, in addition to all the LV electrical work including distribution board upgrades in all the existing plant rooms.

It’s quite a large site and one of the benefits of managing the entire decarbonisation project, is that we can plan sensibly to ensure minimal disruption and maximum efficiency. As we’re managing all the civil work too, we can plan to use the same 220m trench to run both the HV and heating distribution using 160mm Pre-insulated Casaflex piping.

This creates a ‘district’ style system and feeds hot water out for heating to the whole site via a new central primary air source heat pump set-up located in an external compound. The old plant rooms will also be used to house replacement plant. By working in this way, we can connect into existing provisions and avoid replacing some relatively new radiators and pipework throughout the various buildings.

We are also working on three more of Mersey Care’s sites across the Liverpool City Region and in each, we are working to greatly reduce the carbon impact of the heating and hot water provision helping them to meet their goal of being net zero carbon by 2045.

Account Management

The project is being managed by Paul Cooper, Major Projects Divisional Manager, who said “It’s a really interesting project, as there are a lot of disparate elements that we are pulling together to make the whole better than the sum of the parts. I’m looking forward to getting my teeth into this one and delivering the decarbonisation solution they need.

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.”