Howard McKew, P.E., C.P.E.

How often has an AHU or system been reused as part of a building renovation project and/or to expand the area served by the associated unit to provide additional air conditioning or heating?

This month’s B2B will focus on a hospital’s offsite data center as described in the 2015 ASHRAE Handbook — HVAC Applicationschapter 19.

This past May I wrote in the Back2Basics column about the design intent of a small city school system that chose to invest in an annual contract for a temporary air-cooled chiller for special events and emergency crisis shelter center.

This month’s B2B will focus on a new 12-classroom building addition, each room with its own closed loop ground source heat pump (GSHP) unit.

Spot exhaust is a unique design engineering challenge. The 2015 ASHRAE Handbook – HVAC Applicationscovers a broad spectrum of applications in just about all the comfort applications (chapters 1 through 13) and industrial applications (chapters 14 through 33) with personal safety an integral part of chapter 32. But spot return air doesn’t get much press in ASHRAE.

When I got started in the HVAC business half a century ago, I was very fortunate to work for a small firm where I learned a lot about design engineering from some really knowledgeable and practical HVAC engineers. The business we were in was designing HVAC for hospitals, colleges, universities, research facilities, and museums. All of these facilities required very sophisticated central air systems, heating systems, and chilled water systems.

This month’s B2B will focus on a small city school system that chose to invest in an annual contract for a temporary air-cooled chiller for special events and an emergency crisis shelter center.

What better time to talk about integrity than in a presidential election year. Certainly the perception of integrity within the building industry is much, much more low-key than the integrity of politicians, but it is the political environment that sets the bar for bad behavior. 

This month’s B2B will focus on an existing datacom room located within a 200,000-sq-ft financial business office building. The existing datacom room is being expanded from 10,000 sq ft to 20,000 sq ft.