Cooling a secondary school assembly hall

The space

A school's main assembly hall is one of the harder rooms in the building to keep comfortable. It's a large, high-ceilinged space with tall windows, and when it's full the room gains heat quickly.

The answer was three separate 7.1 kW Samsung wall-mounted systems, spaced along the long wall between the windows. Three independent systems spread the output evenly across the room and give 21.3 kW of cooling in total. As heat pumps, they heat the hall too.

The challenge: 600 mm of solid brick

Each system needs a route through the wall for its refrigerant pipework, cabling and condensate. In a modern building that's a routine core through a cavity wall. Here the hall walls are 600 mm of solid brick, roughly six bricks deep, so every route had to be core drilled through the full thickness.

Coring through that much solid masonry is slow, heavy work, and the core has to come out cleanly in the right place on both faces of the wall, with pipework and trunking lined up on either side. It's what set the pace of the whole job.

The approach: one unit a day

The installation ran at one complete system per day. Each day covered the core, the indoor unit, the pipe run, the outdoor unit and the connections for that system. The job took three days in total.

The outdoor units are floor-mounted in a courtyard next to the hall. Students don't use that courtyard, which made it an ideal spot: the units sit on the ground rather than being hung high on the old brickwork, they're out of the way of pupils, and they sit close to the hall they serve.

All three systems were commissioned by Cheshire Climate Solutions Ltd, a Refcom F-Gas certified company (certificate REF1023295).