After damage from Irene and Sandy, 135 Montgomery Street in Jersey City installed replacement chillers on the roof.
A one-two punch to a building led to three times the charm for its chillers.
At 135 Montgomery Street, a 21-story residential co-op along the waterfront in Jersey City, the last two major storms have tested the resolve of its board and management. When the board replaced the building’s original electric chiller from 1963 with a gas-fired one in 2009, they thought they were set for another long stretch. Two years later, however, Hurricane Irene flooded the ground-floor mechanical room, destroying the chillers. Shortly after replacing the chillers, the building got walloped again last fall by Superstorm Sandy, which flooded the lobby, mailroom, mechanical room, and everything in its path, including the almost-new chillers.
With the threat of future storms looming, the board decided it wasn’t worth the risk of putting yet more new chillers in the line of fire, even though installing the chillers in a different location would cost about $300,000 more. Because RAND designed and administered the building’s chiller replacement after Hurricane Irene and we knew the building well, the board and TKR Property Services turned to us to come up with alternatives for relocating the new chillers somewhere other than the mechanical room.
The two main options were to put the chillers on a 10-foot-tall platform in the parking lot or up on the roof. The board decided to install the chillers on the roof, where they would be out of sight and out of the way. Not only was it more aesthetically pleasing to put them where no one could see them, it was also a bit less expensive because a steel platform where a cooling tower had been was already in place on the roof, reducing the cost of installation.
The $1 million project entailed installing two Yazaki chillers, one 150-ton, the other 100-ton. We ran electrical and gas service from the mechanical room to the roof, and circulating pump motors and a water pump were installed. The project also included repairing boilers, pumps, and electrical systems in the mechanical room. The new "double-effect" chillers will provide back-up heating for the building in winter. (For more on the project, see this article in Habitat magazine.)
Although a project of this scope can take up to two years, RAND and the contractor, National Mechanical, were able to complete the project in six months, providing residents with air conditioning for this summer’s especially brutal heat wave. "It was incredibly fast," says the building’s property manager Howard Mandel of TKR Property Services. “Timing was a big issue, because everyone wanted air-conditioning before the summertime."
RAND is currently designing an upgrade to the building’s electrical system, which includes installing new equipment on a raised steel platform to protect it from water damage during a flood.
With the hurricane season once again upon us, I'm happy to report the residents at 135 Montgomery Street will be breathing a little easier this year.
