M&E Project Experience: Hotels, Data Centres, Healthcare

Hospitality · Channel Islands

143-bedroom hotel: phased VRV heat recovery replacement

A landmark 143-bedroom Channel Islands hotel, busy year-round, with a twenty-year-old two-pipe R22 heat recovery system at the end of its life. The ban on R22 meant no further repairs to the refrigerant circuits, and the coastal climate had corroded the rooftop condensers so badly they had to be cut up in place and removed in pieces rather than lifted out whole.

I ran the replacement as director in charge of the project. The design solution was Daikin's VRV-Q heat recovery series, developed specifically for R22 replacement, which allowed the existing pipework to be reused with an additional third pipe installed for full heat recovery. Fourteen systems totalling 28 condensing units went in, all Blygold-treated against the coastal environment, serving 143 slim ducted fan coil units low enough (200 mm) to fit the bedroom entrance ceiling voids. Each room got an auto-cleaning filter accessory and a Madoka controller, with the whole installation supervised by an Intelligent Touch Manager mini-BMS run from reception.

The real engineering problem was phasing. The hotel stayed open throughout: rooms came out of service in batches of seven to sixteen over five months, concentrated in the winter occupancy dip, and were handed back fully commissioned. Daikin UK later published the project as a commercial case study.

Systems: 14 × VRV-Q heat recovery (28 condensing units)
Indoor units: 143 slim ducted fan coils + auto-cleaning filters
Controls: Madoka room controllers, ITM mini-BMS
Programme: 5 months, phased, hotel open throughout
Recognition: Published Daikin UK case study

Further experience

A career across install, commissioning, service, and delivery leaves a long project list. These are the sectors that shaped how I work.

Critical infrastructure

Data centre cooling

Close-control cooling for data centre and comms room environments, where the cooling load runs around the clock and a failure is an outage rather than a comfort complaint. The work covered close-control (CRAC) plant, resilience configurations, and tight temperature and humidity bands, including installation and service work in live white space.

Healthcare

Operating theatre ventilation & cooling

Ventilation and cooling for operating theatre suites, which are among the most demanding air systems in any building. Theatre ventilation has strict requirements for air change rates, pressure cascades between rooms, filtration, and validation, and the plant behind it has to be maintainable without compromising a clinical environment. Work at this level teaches you to distrust the phrase "it's just a ventilation system".

Industrial

Process cooling: printing presses, blast chillers & mortuaries

In process cooling the load is whatever the process dictates, and downtime is measured in spoiled product or stopped production. Project experience covers chilled water plant for printing press cooling, blast chillers for commercial catering, and mortuary cooling, where temperature-critical refrigeration, monitoring, and alarm provision are non-negotiable.

Commercial

Commercial offices & chiller plant

Commercial HVAC across office buildings, including premises for financial-services occupiers in the Channel Islands. The work covered VRF and chilled water systems, chiller replacement, ventilation plant, and the planned maintenance regimes that keep it all running. Years of service management responsibility for commercial portfolios shape the designs I produce now: I've maintained too many other people's shortcuts to build my own in.

Residential

High-end residential

Discreet climate systems for high-specification homes: concealed ducted units, acoustic constraints that rule out the easy answers, and clients for whom a visible grille in the wrong place is a defect. Residential work at this level is mostly coordination, threading services through buildings that were designed around the architecture rather than the ductwork.

Projects