Facility Information

The Cosmetic Surgery Center of Huntsville, consisting of Physician’s offices, patient treatment rooms, business office, surgical suites, and recovery area. Constructed in XXXX using the Design-Bid-Build project delivery system.

Facility Problem

The building experienced problems with very high humidity in the patient treatment rooms and office areas. In the surgical suites the surgeons were not able to meet the comfort demands with the system originally designed and installed. In addition the surgeons needed the ability to change the temperature within the suite rapidly.

Challenges

To allow the facility to remain operational except for short duration outages. In order to keep costs down reusing as much of the existing equipment as possible was required. When reducing the temperature in the Operating Suite the relative humidity must stay within design conditions.

Solution

The solution started with an analysis of the facility to determine the actual heating and cooling requirements need to comply with appropriate codes and standards and meet the doctors’ needs.

The office and treatment areas were found to have more capacity than was needed. This was causing inadequate dehumidification in these areas. The solution was to abandon one unit entirely and reconnect the areas served by it to another unit. A second unit was replaced with a smaller unit with two stages of cooling to allow for better dehumidification. A third unit had electric reheat added and additional controls for the dehumidification system. All of this was accomplished without any disruption to normal operations.

The Operating Suite was a significantly larger challenge. Analysis revealed the existing equipment capacity was only about half of what was required. The solution here was to increase the capacity by changing to low temperature chilled water from the original DX system. The only item not reused in this conversion was the original cooling coil. Additional cooling capacity as well as the necessary components to employ and control a chilled water system were also added. Controls were added to allow the surgeons to change the temperature up and down with a simple switch and to allow the staff to monitor the temperature and humidity on digital displays. Control routines were implemented to automatically place the suite in an energy conservation mode during unoccupied periods. Finally, changes were made to allow for the proper pressurization between the various rooms in the suite.

Most of the work was performed during normal working hours to keep costs to a minimum. The work in the suite itself was scheduled during periods when surgery was not scheduled to minimize disruptions.