Over £100,000 saved – Vodafone Testing Facility, Newbury

Background

As one of the ‘Big Four’ mobile communication providers in the UK, Vodafone rely on maintaining full operational capacity across all their sites. Improving the cooling efficiency to their data centre, therefore, presented a unique project that incorporated a multitude of Cooltherm’s strengths.

Cooltherm, alongside long-term partners Geoclima, installed three Turbomiser air cooled water chillers, providing enhanced efficiencies and flexible cooling capacity at Vodafone’s Accenture test facility site in Newbury.

Vodafone wanted the finished project to provide a robust and efficient system which would provide smooth and stable water temperatures to their data halls.

Project

The project was to replace their aging scroll machines – which were inefficient and struggling to provide smooth water delivery temperatures to the computer equipment rooms – for more modern, larger capacity chillers.

On inspection, it was noted that the site had deployed a combination of DX refrigerant and chilled water computer room cooling equipment (CRAC units), resulting in a system that didn’t provide effective and efficient cooling, especially on the DX systems.

The project was managed as a phased approach: replacing one chiller at a time over a period of four weeks. This was to guarantee that the data centre had 100% up time throughout the transition to the updated equipment.

Cooltherm installed new Turbomiser chillers that matched the original chillers’ cooling capacity of 280kW at 35% efficiency, with the capability to increase their cooling output to 400kW each.

The machines were designed to be more compact than the average chiller of this capacity improving service and maintenance access to a restricted ground-level chiller compound.

During the initial inspection of the site, we discovered that the original 100kW indoor DX Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) units were in structurally good condition, and had recently undergone EC fan conversion.

Therefore, to reduce both waste and overall cost to the customer, the Cooltherm project team developed bespoke chilled water coils to replace the original DX coils. This fresh design maintained the cooling duty without increasing the static air resistance the fans needed to overcome.

This development – a new valve control package to accurately control the air temperature provided by the units, integrating the new valve package with the original front end controller – delivered a seamless transition from DX refrigerant cooling to chilled water.

Results

The new chillers and converted CRAC units now operate with precise capacity control because of the Turbomiser chillers’ abilities to match the required load KW per KW. The new chilled water system is now operating with a variable chilled water volume, which means only the water flow needed by the building is pumped, resulting in more energy savings.

To that point, Rob Young, Cooltherm Project Manager for this project, says:

“The chillers alone are currently saving Vodafone 10% on their energy bill compared to last year, each percentage point saved, saves the client over £1000.00 per month. To put this into context, between May and July they have already saved over £30k, this is due to the increased cooling load due to the adoption of the DX cooling CRACs, and the CRAC units using less than 20% of the power when they were operating as DX systems. Always with green credentials in mind, 80kg of F-gas refrigerants has also been removed from site during the conversion process.”