Actionair Fan Coil Units are helping to provide a comfortable working environment for refurbished offices in Chesham House on London's Regent Street.

Special offset discharge plenums had to be created to match the building services design developed by Consultants Hilson Moran to overcome structural limitations within the 1920's Beaux Arts building that forms part of the "Curve" on one of the capital's most famous and most fashionable thoroughfares.

Regent's Street and fashion have always gone hand in hand since 1811 when architect John Nash first designed the street to link the Prince Regent's home in Carlton House with his proposed new palace in Regent's Park.

Chesham House is owned by the Crown Estates and forms part of a major redevelopment under the watchful eye of English Heritage to ensure that the new blends harmoniously with the old. In this way the existing stone facades of the front of the building have been retained, while at the rear a new entrance has been created for the offices.

Within the building the designers faced a problem in routing services through the 500mm deep beams, which support the floor structures of the 5-storey office accommodation. In order to minimize the number of penetrations it was decided to increase the diameter of the ductwork runs, so that the required total airflow could be achieved while retaining structural integrity. This in turn required Actionair to develop special discharge plenums for the 2-pipe/ Electric heating PHW Fan Coil Units to match the ductwork sizes and fit level with the beams.

Quiet running
Actionair's well-proven PHW Hydropac Fan Coil range is designed for waterside control and offers versions for both cased and chassis only applications. Units have high levels of thermal and acoustic insulation and offer easy access to the quiet running double-inlet, forward curved centrifugal fans, which are mounted on easily removable decks. Condensate trays are one-piece welded units extended to cover the entire coil and valve assembly

and can be easily removed for cleaning and maintenance.

Noise levels from each fan coil unit are contained to an absolute minimum by meticulous balancing of impeller/motor assembly, resilient mounting of the fans and insulation of the integral discharge plenum.

Like all the latest Actionair fan coil units, Hydropac models offer the unique feature of fine adjustment fan speed regulation, which enables an accurate match of output to space requirements during on-site commissioning. A choice of 11 different settings ensures minimum energy consumption by matching the system requirements in each location throughout the building.

All Hydropac units incorporate washable EU3 filters as standard, with a wide range of special filters available to meet the precise needs of each application.

Special features
The 250 PHW Hydropac units supplied by Actionair to the project also incorporate a number of special features including 1500W electric heater batteries controlled by solid state relays to give improved performance. Manual reset overheat protection and a fan proving switch were also fitted.

Cooling duties for the Actionair Fan Coils at Chesham House range between 600W and 4.3kW.

Full acoustic and thermal performance testing was carried out on the proposed Actionair designs before manufacture began at the Whitstable factory.

Mechanical and Electrical contractors for the Chesham House project are N. G. Bailey.

Actionair is a Division of Ruskin Air Management Ltd

Email: sales@actionair.co.uk