230 Central Park West's community room, also known as the Round Room, suffered from chronic over heating.
The community room known as the Round Room at 230 Central Park West, a 105-unit prewar co-op, can once again welcome its visitors year round without anyone breaking into a sweat. The Round Room, which has no windows, suffered from chronic disproportionate heating-and-cooling levels which made it unusable for up to five months each year. Sometimes, the room temperature reached 90 degrees. Even in the winter, large, crowded gatherings would turn the windowless room into a sauna. But when the air conditioning was turned on, doctors' offices, occupying commercial spaces on the ground floor of the co-op, became unbearably cold.
The Round Room's new air handler unit is ceiling-hung with spring isolators.
RAND was hired to assess the overheating problem and come up with a solution. The building, which was originally a hotel, had a shared cooling system between the community room and the commercial spaces on the ground floor and mezzanine level. Based on our findings, our recommendation was to separate the community room's system from the system that cooled the doctors' offices and other commercial spaces.
The board at 230 Central Park West requested that the ornate wood paneling in the Round Room remain in tact. During our assessment, we discovered a defunct system of ducts in the basement that had once fed fresh outdoor air into the Round Room through a pair of metal grilles and we knew we could bring in conditioned air through them.
New registers were installed while maintaining the ornate woodwork in the Round Room at 230 Central Park West.
As there wasn't a good outdoor location for a heat pump, we chose a traditional 'split' system - an evaporator and condenser. Royal HVAC Systems installed the hardware. The evaporator, or air handler, was installed in the basement directly below the community room, and the condenser, which ejects heat, was placed under a sidewalk grate. This meant we were able to fix the heating-and-cooling systems while still maintaining the ornate woodwork, much to the board's relief.
Luckily, the board was very hands-on. They had conducted long-range planning so their goals were clear-cut, and they were very careful about how their money was allocated. The total cost for the project came out to be right on budget at $44, 650. Another way to measure the success of the project? The Round Room is now a very popular gathering place year around.
For more on this project, see the article in Habitat Magazine.
Peter E. Varsalona, PE is one of RAND's Principals and MEP Team Leader.
