Decarbonisation work begins at Rathbone Hospital

We are proud to announce that we have been appointed by Mitie on behalf of Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust to complete a £2.8m decarbonisation project across their Liverpool Estate, with the biggest project being at Rathbone Hospital in Old Swan.

Our work with properties owned by the Rathbone family has been significant over recent years as 2020 saw the reopening of the refurbished Greenbank House, that began its life as the holiday home of the Rathbones in 1787 and remained within the family until 1940, when it was sold to the University of Liverpool.

Rathbone Hospital is now part of Merseycare NHS Foundation Trust and specialises in mental health care as well as operating a low secure mental health unit. The history of the site can be traced back to 1885, when it was built by William Rathbone VI, a prominent philanthropist and social reformer who was concerned about the poor health of Liverpool’s working-class population.

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 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.