Wrexham AFSRC Air conditioning

We recently completed a project at Wrexham Ambulance and Fire Services Resource Centre (AFSRC) to add comfort cooling to the office space.

The lower floors of the building, which opened in 2016, house the emergency vehicles, whilst the upper floors are laid out as an open plan call centre along with general offices and meeting rooms. Completion of the build allowed for the co-location of the fire and ambulance services, who already have a close working relationship and attend many incidents together.

What makes this job a little unusual is the pitched ceiling and the scale of the space. With a floor plate of 234m2 and a 3m ceiling height at the lowest point, it’s a tricky space to install comfort cooling equipment. Add in a full length, south-facing glass window on one side and the challenge grows a little more.

The Kimpton Air Conditioning team designed two twin split systems with four cassettes internally mounted, with a 25m run of pipework leading to two air-cooled external condensers, located on the rear of the building, mounted above ground-level.

The ceiling cassette units need to be kept perfectly horizontal to allow the system to work correctly. If it was fitted following the fall of a pitched roof, any condensation produced would simply leak out of the side of the unit and out onto the office space below, before it had chance to be drained away by the gravity drainage system.

So the team devised a way to work with a cassette collar to allow it to remain horizontal. These are more normally used when there’s limited space in a roof void to fit a conventional cassette. It’s an innovative approach to a potentially common problem.

As with many of our jobs, we worked around a very busy working space, so most of the indoor work was completed by the team over two subsequent weekends and the outdoor work completed within a week after that.

We’re delighted with the results and so are the cool team at Wrexham AFSRC.