The hygiene regime at a health centre in Hull includes Marco’s Hygeia uPVC trunking for electrical services. This trunking incorporates an anti-microbial compound as an integral part of the 1000 m of trunking installed at Bransholme Health Centre.

The new set for the BBC’s ‘Silent witness’ programme is much more comfortable for the cast and crew than the previous set. That set was so cold in Winter that the actors’ breath was visible during indoor scenes, and it was also very hot in Summer. Those problems led to costly delays and interruptions. Design engineering consultant Maleon was asked to investigate the problem and advise if a new heating and cooling solution could be designed to work around a new set design.

External-wall insulation with ventilation channels in it to raise the temperature of incoming fresh air has been retrofitted to homes in Longstanton, Cambridgeshire, as part of the Rampton Drift Project. The monitoring phase of development is now underway. The project aims to identify the costs, effects and benefits of a range of low-carbon sustainable technologies by refurbishing existing homes on the estate.

MHS Boilers has supplied three 120 kW Thision L wall-hung boilers and 10 m2 of Solartron S2.5 flat-panel solar collectors to the recently opened Parc Eirias Events Centre in Colwyn Bay. The boilers were installed in a wall-mounted cascade frame with a low-loss header. This £6.5 million centre is a cornerstone of regeneration plans for Colwyn Bay. It comprises a large multi-purpose indoor centre for recreational use and a conference centre for business and commercial events.

The installation of a 14 kW Vaillant geoTHERM ground-source heat pump has been completed at Waters End Farm in Cranbrook, Kent, for Maurice Bosch, who owns a Vaillant borehole drilling contractor, Geo Tech Developments. He explains, ‘This ground-source heat pump has been installed to provide heating for our farmhouse.’ It replaces an existing system and qualifies for the Renewable Heat Incentive, unlike the previous system.’

When the Needles Old Battery on a headland overlooking the Isle of Wight’s famous lighthouse needed a new heating system, the National Trust, which owns the site, opted for an air-source heat pump from Dimplex. The LI 16 TE unit provides heating and DHW for the visitor tea room and National Trust offices at this popular visitor attraction. It was installed by Dimplex accredited installer Clarke’s Mechanical to replace an oil-fired boiler.

A major contribution to the provision of services for the Co-operative’s new £100 million 46 500 m2 headquarters in Manchester is being made by risers made off site by Pipe Center’s Modular Engineering business for contractor Rotary North West. The building is due for completion in Summer 2012 and will have a BREEAM ‘Outstanding’ rating. It will bring together 12 Co-operative businesses occupying eight separate buildings.

Offsite manufacture of Armstrong 8000 Series packaged pump solutions played a key role in helping to meet extremely tight project timescales for the refurbishment of London Underground’s Neasden Depot. This is the largest depot on the London Underground network and the main depot for the Metropolitan Line. The refurbishment will create facilities suitable for a new fleet of air-conditioned trains.

Low-energy cooling and heating for the new Pain Centre at Salford Royal Hospital is provided by chilled beams supplied by Waterloo Air Products. The Manchester & Salford Pain Centre is on a new purpose-built extension to the existing Irvine Building and is part of an extensive building programme being phased over five years.

Integral to the operation of the Crystal sustainable-cities initiative by Siemens in London’s Green Enterprise District is a bespoke power distribution board, the Sivacon S4. It has been designed in conjunction with Siemens solution partner ICWPower to suit the specific applications and requirements of the building. To help achieve high levels of energy efficiency for this building, the distribution board includes integral power-factor-correction equipment.

Helping to reduce energy and carbon emissions at Thomas Rotherham College in South Yorkshire is a solar-thermal system supplied by Stokvis Energy Systems to provide hot water for staff and public toilet. The system for this college for 16- to 19-year olds is expected to achieve energy savings of 2.6 to 3 MWh a year.

R22 chiller plant at the London offices of a global investment bank has been replaced with bespoke plant from Star Refrigeration using Turbocor compressors. Star designed, built, installed and commissioned air-cooled LPR refrigeration plant comprising four 600 kW chillers using R134a. The project was completed within six months from order to commissioning with no adverse effect on the bank’s business activity or interruption to HVAC services.

A listed community building in Kilbirnie, Ayrshire, has been fitted with 240 solar thermal vacuum tubes from Kingspan Renewables to provide domestic hot water. Once an art deco cinema, Radio City now provides a range of facilities — including a gym, radio station, cafe, IT, office spaces and beauty rooms. The 25 m2 of HP200 Thermomax solar-thermal tubes was part of a large retrofit project to reduce carbon emissions and running costs. The project also include Solar PV panels.

MicroCHP is one of the technologies being installed in a Victorian terraced house in London as part of the ‘Retrofit for the future’ programme initiated by the Technology Strategy Board. The 2-bedroom, mid-terrace house at 88 Lothrop Street was built around 1880 and has solid walls. It was awarded a fund of £150 000 to deliver an 80% reduction in carbon emissions using a range of technologies. The retrofit was designed by ECD architects and works carried out by United House.

Daikin’s energy-saving Conveni-pack all-in-one solution for heating, cooling and air-conditioning in food retailers has marked its 100th installation in Germany in a branch of denn’s Biomarkt, an organic supermarket chain. It is the 24th of the company’s branches to be equipped with Conveni-pack systems. Conveni-pack integrates high- and low-temperature refrigeration, air conditioning, heating and cooling in a single-system solution.

Energy savings of over £26 000 a year are expected at hospital sites in Bradford following the installation of ABB standard drives for HVAC to 28 air-handling units at Bradford Royal Infirmary and St Luke’s Hospital. The drives are installed in critical areas such as theatres and infection-controlled zones where airflow is controlled to promote safety and comfort. The load on the AHUs varies with outside temperature, but the biggest difference is between day and night, with fans typically running at half speed at night.

As part of the refurbishment of the Kingsway Hall Hotel in London’s Covent Garden, a Dimplex ARC architectural air curtain has been installed to prevent draughts from the large entrance doorway with automatic sliding doors. These 2 m-high doors open into the main reception and adjacent bar area, and the potential for uncomfortable draughts was recognised by general manager Laszlo Nyari, who consulted with John Kindell of JWK Electrical, the hotel’s electrical contractor.

HCP has supplied a range of perimeter heating and air-handling grilles for the new Terminal 2 at Dublin Airport. Over 1400 m of floor-mounted straight and curved perimeter heaters with double heating elements has been installed. They are encased in stainless-steel metal casings with a horizontal brushed finish to meet aesthetic requirements. A mock-up of the units was prepared with Mercury Engineering Dublin.

A key role in the operation of a new £150 million data centre for HSBC in Yorkshire is played by the Durapipe PLX pipe-in-pipe specialist fuel pipework system to deliver fuel oil from storage tanks to standby generators in the case of an emergency. M&E contractor ASEE supplied and installed this pipework system for the centre at Normanton.

As part of the conversion of an indoor crown-bowls facility in Barnsley into a 7-lane 10-pin bowling venue, air-conditioning equipment from the Ecolution range of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has been installed. This twin split system supplied by 3D Air Sales is part of a project by Barnsley Premier Leisure.

A Yorkshire community that uses Dimplex solar PV panels to generate low-carbon electricity and access the Feed-in Tariffs has featured in a television advertisement for Mars. Fund raising by the villagers of Carperby in Wensleydale included sponsorship from the Mars community programme.

Investment in thermal imaging is playing a key role in helping the London Borough of Camden meet targets for reducing carbon emissions and energy consumption by 21% by 2015 and 40% by 2020. The technology makes for efficient identification of problem areas and the creation of public awareness through specially designed tags.

A key role in the air-conditioning installation for The Shard in London will be played by Durapipe’s Guardian dual-contained pipework system to transport chemically dosed water from the chillers in the basement to cooling towers at level 18 of this 310 m-tall building. Since this pipework transports chemically dosed water, it was important that the system is not at risk of corrosion. In addition, dual containment ensures the public and environment are protected against potential leaks.

Some 200 h of labour time for the refurbishment of the Department of Transport, Tourism & Sport building in Dublin, was achieved using Marshall-Tufflex’s prefabricated MT32 prewired underfloor power-delivery system — according to Donal Hackett of building-services contractor Mercury Engineering.

Scottish Hydro Electric has boosted its fleet of trailer generators with the addition of over 40 units from Power Electrics Generators. These 3-phase units have outputs from 33 to 100 kVA and can operate in 3-phase, split-phase, set-to-set synchronising and set-to-mains synchronising modes.

Automatic testing of the emergency lighting in the new multi-million Surrey Sport Park of the University of Surrey is carried out by P4’s M-Web system. Michael Harris, an electrical engineer with the university, explains. ‘We needed to ensure that our emergency-lighting system would provide the safest, most accurate and convenient remote-monitoring procedure through its local-area network. Our objective was also to have a system that would not be labour intensive, would prove maintenance friendly and be accurate.’

The total renovation of a house in Ealing includes discreet and energy-efficient heating and cooling provided by IBD Distribution’s Invisible.AC sdhvac system powered by Daikin Altherma heat pumps, which also provide domestic hot water. IBD also recommended underfloor heating for the ground-level stone floor areas.

Natural ventilation and lighting is provided by Monodraught systems for the new school on St Mary’s island for the Isles of Scilly’s 280 pupils aged from three to 16 years. The building is mainly single storey and has large areas of glazing. A focus for the design of the school was keeping things simple to that maintenance of services such as ventilation and lighting could be managed locally by islanders. With this in mind, design-and build contractor Kier, Grainge Architects and building-services designer Hulley & Kirkwood selected Monodraught to provide a strategy for natural ventilation and daylighting.

Existing R22 refrigeration plant in a UK data centre has been replaced with a bespoke cooling system installed by Star Refrigeration using chillers with Turbocor compressors and R134a refrigerant. There are four new chillers, each with a cooling capacity of 1100 kW with variable-speed drives and an air-cooled refrigerant circuit configured for thermosyphon operation to provide free cooling when possible. The previous plant had a cooling capacity of 2700 kW.

Thermal Technology has supplied a special swimming-pool air-handling unit from its SpaVent range to the Beacon Leisure Centre in Burntlisland, Fife. The unit was selected and sized to serve the flume tower, which is over 19 m high. The unit is at ground level, and a supply air duct delivers warm air 16 m up the tower. Extract air is taken away at a height of about 19 m.

A combined smoke and natural-ventilation system from SE Controls is helping to create a comfortable and safe environment for patients, visitors and staff at Salford Royal Hospital’s new £90 million Hope Building. The 5-storey building houses a new A&E department, as well as providing 242 beds, emergency assessment unit and critical care facilities.

Recent orders for Roth UK solar-thermal solutions include major contracts for Summerfield Developments for its Cutcombe housing scheme on Exmoor and nearby sites at Williton and Bower Hinton. The projects utilise Roth’s innovative single panel-in-roof kit, selected for system quality, ease of fitting and technical competence of the group’s German manufacturing.

Waterwise Technology is to supply all the water-treatment for the new BAA Terminal 2 at Heathrow Airport. When completed, the new building will be larger than Terminal 5 and is designed to produce 40% less carbon than the existing Terminal 2. Water-treatment systems selected for the project will significantly contribute to those energy savings.

The new football pavilion in Llanbradach Park, Caerphilly, built to replace the building destroyed by arson has its hot-water requirements met by two propane-fired condensing storage water heaters from Andrews Water Heaters. The original building was over a hundred years old and its loss left Caerphilly Town FC and Llanbradach Social FC without playing facilities as they were unable to provide changing rooms for away teams and referees.

Nearly 2000 Dimplex solar PV panels have been installed at a solar power station in Dorset, said to be the largest of its kind in the county. It comprises 1780 polycrystalline solar PV panels capable of generating over 500 MWh a year and arranged over nine rows on a 3 acre site.

Flakt Woods has supplied whole-house heat-recovery units as part of an overall ventilation solution for upgrading student accommodation at Exeter University. The development on the university’s Streatham Campus involved new-build and complete fit-out studio accommodation, en-suite bedrooms and kitchens.

The Zetter Townhouse, a new boutique hotel in St John’s Square in the Clerkenwell area of London has become the first building in the UK to install Legrand’s Synergy Flat Plate wiring accessories. Winner of the Good Hotel Guide’s London Hotel of the Year, The Zetter Townhouse has 13 bedrooms and is described as ‘slightly eccentric’ by its owners Mark Sainsbury and Michael Benyan, ‘fabulous’ by The Sunday Times and a ‘tour de force bursting with character and invention’ by The Daily Telegraph.

The traditional German beer purity laws originally permitted only water, barley and hops to be used to produce beer. Other substances are now permitted, and at the Paulaner brewery in Munich includes Wilo submersible-motor pumps to draw water from four on-site wells that are up to 240 m deep. The pumps are popular with the brewer because of their reliability and longevity; one of the pumps has operated since 1984 and repaired just once in 2004.