San Francisco Hilton Upgrades Air Handler Using FANWALL TECHNOLOGY

The San Francisco Hilton is a high-rise hotel in downtown San Francisco with a mechanical room on the 13th floor that is kind of buried in the bellows of the building - it's very difficult to get to. They have several different air handlers that are serving different areas of the building, and it's a very tight mechanical space.

They had a multi-zone air handler that needed to be replaced. The original solution was going to be to replace that single air handler with four separate smaller air handlers. Instead, the team decided to use FANWALL. The project went great: the project was completed on time, and the owner was very happy with the solution. It was a much easier project than it would have been to bring in four separate air handlers. We saved about a hundred and thirty seven thousand KWH from the energy perspective and received about a thirteen thousand dollar rebate.

The scope was to replace the outside air dampers and existing fan and replace it with a hot air FANWALL system, replace the ductwork, replace all the coils with copper fin coils, and replace all the zone dampers.

• The FANWALL retrofit was a much easier installation compared to a complete change out and met the customer's needs better. With the retrofit, we were able to change the configuration of the air handler from a constant volume to VAV system, offering significant optimization of energy control. We also added a CO2 monitoring system on each zone so we could override the outside air control dampers for demand control ventilation needs, as required. Retrofitting the design using four custom hot water air handlers and rebuilding those within the space allowed the team to complete the job within budget.
• The FANWALL is very smooth and very quiet.
• We have some leeway as far as performance, we can increase or decrease the air and fine-tune the air handling unit in place. And, it seemed to be a better fit for our application than four new air handlers.
• One of the big benefits we saw in the FANWALL was from a maintenance standpoint: I have reliability because if one fan goes out, I can still keep the operation going and keep my guests happy.