The Murphy Company Design-Build team was tasked to design a project that reduced the energy rates in a 70-year-old lab/office building (Building 20), that was originally built as a warehouse in the 1940s and another building that was built in 1995 (Building 95) that was seeing extreme negative pressure within.
The challenges the design team faced were reducing energy rates while still adhering to the strict lab heating, cooling, and airflow requirements. The challenges faced by the construction team was working in an occupied building with tight space requirements for installation and a tight schedule of having the heating system up and running by Fall. For Building 20, the design and construction of demoing the old boilers and installing new ones was a collaborative effort on all parts. The design team worked with the foreman and pipe fabrication manager to design a piping system that only required three field welds – the rest were completed in the fab shop.
Installing the heating coils for the new VAV system had to be done at night due to the building being occupied. With significant pre-planning, a two-crew team knocked out 12 new coils in six days. Murphy was given a change order towards the end of the project to install two new chilled water pumps and 12 chilled water control valves. Work had to take place on weekends. Work was completed with a eight man crew ahead of schedule.
For Building 95, our team installed solar panels to heat a domestic hot water system. A two man plumbing crew worked with the solar vendor and Murphy designers to complete this work. The Murphy design-build team worked diligently with the building manager and lab personnel to reduce airflow rates in 14 labs. This helped reduce the negative pressure within the building and also gave the owner the groundwork to continue to reduce rates in all other lab rooms.
