In Seattle, Capital Heating, Cooling & Plumbing is in the middle of a long-term project for King County Transit. We’re pretty excited about this one—it tests our technical and collaboration skills and, at its conclusion, we will have upgraded a major heating and cooling system for the city’s main bus hub—an operation with its own vehicle maintenance infrastructure, paint shop, tire shop, and more.
For this job, we’re swapping out all of the equipment and mechanical components for full HVAC systems in three of the facility’s most important buildings: the vehicle maintenance building, the the non-revenue vehicle maintenance building, and the tire mill. We’re also replacing their vehicle exhaust systems—a huge welding job.
In other words, we’re helping Seattle heat and cool three important, decades-old buildings more efficiently.
Chris Seversike, our project manager, is overseeing the removal and replacement of all rooftop equipment, duct work, and installing. (Cool tech side note: a water source heat pump is a hydronic—or water-powered—system that produces heated and cooled air, a system you can use in place of a conventional furnace. Environmentally, they’re pretty nifty: because they use less fuel, they’re better for the planet. They also make less noise than a conventional furnace.
A couple of factors make this a tricky job, Chris tells us. First, the proximity of electrical wires overhead makes the use of some equipment and vehicles impossible; tall trucks won’t work for this site.
Second, this is an important hub doing work that can’t stop just because the HVAC system is being replaced. Chris and his team are working closely with the client and with other trade teams to coordinate. To get it done, they’re sequencing the work: shutting down just one work bay at a time. As Chris says, it’s a study in coordination.
Our hats are off to King County for making this happen. It’s a big job. But once it’s done, their employees will be working in healthier buildings with heating and cooling systems that run at a lower operating cost. And this more reliable, more efficient equipment will likely not need to be replaced for decades.
Chris says the project is due to wrap up this August. Until then, he’s happy to be on this team. “We’re working with a lot of talented people. It takes a great team to make a remodel job like this successful.”