Andy Anderson, Project Manager (left) and Mike McCauley, Sales Engineer, Elliott-Lewis Corp., the installing mechanical contractor, examine the completed installation.
Tim Moss, Manager of Mr. Goodtower Service Group for Energy Transfer Solutions, inspects a system heat exchanger while documenting performance.
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COMMERCIAL CONSTRUCTION & RENOVATION — DECEMBER 2020
of challenges faced by facility managers at the hotel. Managers of Korman Communities were able to get engineers on board to ensure they were provided the best options and also to assure that all project bidders would be on the same page. “Since the dynamics of the building had changed and they anticipated more changes in the future, the owners wanted to put it into the hands of professional designers who could take everything into account and come up with the best solution,” McCauley says. Holstein White Inc., a Pennsylvania-based consulting firm, was chosen to do the design. Elliott-Lewis was chosen to handle installation work, trusted as a member of the Mechanical Contractors’ Association of America (MCAA) and serving Philadelphia for a century. The original cooling tower was a discontinued EVAPCO unit, a PMTQ cooling tower. But that didn’t stop EVAPCO from retrieving the design from their archives and building one to meet all the requirements for the new project with an ability to meet a sharply increased cooling demand, yet with the same footprint. In addition, the new tower needed to meet or exceed current codes for thermal and acoustic performance. Ultimately, Ben Franklin building owners were able to increase the system’s cooling capacity on the heat pump loop from about 565 tons up to 675 tons, without sacrificing space. “One unique feature of the new unit is the use of EVAPCO’s super low sound fan,” says Casey Younkins, Director of Sales for Energy Transfer Solutions, representative for EVAPCO for this project. “It’s not the typical centrifugals you’d see on a forced draft. This building is right in the middle of a densely-populated part of Philadelphia with office buildings and residences around it, so there are noise concerns because of property lines. We needed to specify the quietest fan available to make sure we didn’t draw the attention of neighboring professionals or facility managers.”