When Bay Air took over the HVAC Preventative Maintenance and service on the Wells Fargo Plaza in downtown Oakland, we had no idea that we would outlive the new HVAC system.
The building owners were desperate in 1981; the latest “constant volume perimeter skin heating/cooling” design for this new high end building wasn’t working. The tenants (mostly lawyers, including Stewart Boxer, Senator Barbara Boxer’s husband) were extremely unhappy. They had spent months and thousands of dollars in corrective measures, to no avail, recommended by the installing contractor. After John Morgan; Bay Air’s founder, evaluated the system, he recommended several low cost measures to make the offices reasonably comfortable and mitigate problems resulting from the poor design. (One example of the corrective measures was; reversing the pneumatically controlled VAVs to allow for a more effective Morning Warm-up Cycle). The owners decided to place their confidence in this “new” company and never regretted it.
Over 20 years later, the owner (Terry) was finally convinced that the poorly designed and troublesome system needed to be replaced with something better. He asked Bay Air to design and build a retrofit that would provide superior comfort, reliability, and greater energy efficiency.
The retrofit finished with the highest quality Haakon Air Handler, built specifically for this special application. The water-cooled Evaporative Condenser and single 100-ton open reciprocating compressor were replaced with a single Trane 80-ton Air Cooled Condensing unit with 6 separate scroll compressors and 2 distinct refrigeration circuits. This provided greatly reduced energy consumption, especially at part load. We could now run a single 10 compressor, for example, for loads that before required a 100 HP motor, unloaded to 25 tons. The multiple compressor design also provided redundancy and allowed us to eliminate the extremely wasteful Hot Gas Bypass system. By replacing all cooling only VAV's with double duct Heat/Cool VAV's, we eliminated the troublesome and wasteful constant volume perimeter heating, greatly improved perimeter comfort control, and downsized the new cooling capacity by 20% (from 100 to 80 tons).
Enhancements to the Solidyne Building Automation System further enhanced comfort and energy savings.
The confidence built here typifies most of Bay Air’s customer relationships. After preliminary design, but before starting the project, John gave Terry a rough estimated cost. Terry responded: “John, Bay Air has always taken care of me. You are a fine Christian gentleman, and I have always trusted you. We don’t need a contract.” So, after shaking hands, Bay Air proceeded on this project estimated at half a million dollars. At Bay Air, honoring the trust of customers and teammates is our highest value. That’s why we weigh every action against this test: Is this …building confidence?
In the end, Bay Air delivered this particular project for a cost significantly less than the original estimate, without interrupting tenant climate control during occupied hours.