Affinity Credit Union Campus is consolidation of this Affinity’s departments from all across Saskatchewan into one central administration building in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. A progressive workplace culture influenced the creation of more staff facilities (meetings rooms, fitness facility), an entire new floor dedicated to staff break-out/relaxation areas and kitchen and lounge space.
Service completion: Summer 2013
Scope of services: Commissioning for system verification and testing
Size: $22,000,000 construction budget
Building systems: Chilled beams and reheat coils, fed by 2 boilers (1 condensing, 1 non-condensing) and air-cooled chiller along with fluid cooler for free cooling
Thurston Engineering Services was hired for system verification and testing, with the owner recognizing the immense benefit of this third party system tuning before occupancy. The owner got their money’s worth, with Thurston Engineering Services finding and managing the rectification of many significant comfort and efficiency issues.
No matter what was done on the building management control system, the fluid cooler was not cooling water! It was found that the unit was factory-set to “heat recovery” mode: it was trying to extract heat from air rather than eject heat to air. The air handling unit valves were not fully closing, despite what the building management control system said, causing costly simultaneous heating and cooling. There was also simultaneous heating and cooling at the zone level where zones were not wired correctly: a call for heating was met with chilled beam cooling….and thus zones had great difficulty meeting setpoint. Finally, thermography detected multiple air locks in the heating and cooling lines allowing no flow to chilled beams. While many of these issues may have been found eventually, solving them during construction (while the contractors were on-site) saved much time and much headache. The costly simultaneous heating/cooling issues may have never been found!