A long standing customer of our sister company, The Generator Company, received contact from the Director of Projects enquiring about temporary power for a project they were working on in London. Temporary power was required to support a mixed use building whilst a permanent standby power solution was sought.
We of course were delighted to help out and our technical sales manager arranged a site visit to discuss the power needs and any site restrictions for the building.
The award winning art-deco-style masterpiece in the trendy Shoreditch area of London, was completed in 2015 for mixed use purposes containing 276 residential spaces comprising a resident’s only spa and cinema, a public square and employment space. The 38,000m2 design retained the original restored 1933 art-deco building with a further 26 floors added that is an elegant addition to the London skyline.
On seeing the site and meeting with the client it was determined that all the temporary equipment would need to be housed in the underground car park for the duration of the project which would mean transporting all the equipment via the car lift down into the basement, which in itself would propose some challenges that we would need to overcome.
Whilst on site our technical sales manager confirmed the weight limit and the door size of the lift to ensure that transporting the equipment by this method was feasible before returning to the office to discuss the project with our operations team.
With the equipment positioned in the basement, we had to consider the dispersion of the diesel fumes from the generators into the outside world. We contacted one of our local suppliers who offered an extraction kit for the control of diesel fumes in buildings and other sensitive areas comprising a very powerful centrifugal fan which was just what was needed.
Taking into account the size and weight restrictions of the car lift and the extraction of the fumes a proposal was submitted to the customer offering 2 x 200kVA temporary generators to run in sync, providing a total of 400kVA, to support the life safety system within the building including fire alarms, elevators and sprinkler systems in the event of a power failure.
As a result of the building currently not having any back up power in place, an Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS) together with a 100 meter cable run was included to monitor the incoming voltage; when utility power is interrupted, the ATS immediately senses the problem and signals the generators to start.
Stage one of the project began with all equipment being delivered using our own Hiab lorry and traffic temporarily halted to allow for the offload at street level. The generator canopies were modified prior to delivery by removing the centre lifting ring on the top of the canopy due to height restrictions of the car lift. The equipment was offloaded and with only a 4mm gap at the top to play with our engineers expertly, and with precision, manoeuvred the generators into the lift and down into the basement car park where they were skated into empty car parking bays ready for stage two connections.
Our engineers returned to site to connect the 2 x 200kVA generators to the clients Switchboard via our own 400Amp Auto Mains Failure (AMF) panel. Due to the constant use of the car park by the buildings residents the main power and control cables were installed onto a cable tray suspended from the carpark roof.
This was followed by the fitting of the exhaust extraction system, for the control of diesel fumes, to both generators to carry the exhaust gasses out of the car park into the open in the event of the generators being activated. Powered directly from the generators, the extraction system will come online as soon as the generators start to run.
All equipment is scheduled to remain on the site whilst a permanent standby power solution is sought by the customer.
