Whats the biggest Air Handler youve ever stood next to or worked on ?

[ilbebauck]

For me it was in the Penthouse of a 50 story Office building in downtown Chicago . The system was an early 1980's VAV field built up System (inlet vanes) with Blower Wheel housing anchored into the concrete floor having a wheel diameter of 8 feet . The Motor had a nameplate of 150 h.p. I dont remember the CFM delivery of the blower but once online with inlet vanes open 50% it was totally deafening . It was unsafe to be in the same room when operational. I remember the Chief Engineer for the building saying the concrete walls that made up a plenum for the Blower were starting to get movement in them and they were going to have to reinforce them. The Return Air fan was almost as impressive .

I wish i had taken pictures but i didnt. If youve got pics of the largest one you witnessed, please post. Thanks.

[Steve]

Don't have pics, but it was in a Bell South facility in Atlanta.... pair of blowers with 10ft wheels in them. the housings were 16ft high. RA filter wall was 40ft wide and 25ft high with water spray nozzles for raising humidity. Hydronic coils and some freakin huge chillers. They had several other facilities with simular setups of different sizes scatered across the Atlanta area. We visited 29 of them.

[.p.jm.]

I did a few with multiple 150 HP blowers ( anchor stores in malls, etc ). a single 150 doesn't sound like NEAR enough for a 50 story building ???? The blower cages were big enough you could walk through them upright if the blower hadn't been inside them, probably similar to your 8 footer.

Probably this one is the biggest I ever worked on -

Better picture - See the big white things in the middle of the roof ? Those are the blower houses :-). IOW, each one is an air handler :-)

The Ericcson site is a 200,000 sq ft building. AC houses on the roof for the blowers, 2 or 3 big centrifugals ( maybe 1,500 each ? ) in the basement. Rough calc - maybe 1,200,000 CFM @ ~ 5 " static pressure ?

I don't recall the HP, but each blower house had multiple fans big enough to walk through, in series for return, and for outside air, and then for supply. The condensate drain was ~ 4 - 6 " diameter, I forget. When the fans got out of sync ( return + OA not keeping up with supply ), the pressure in the interstitial could go so negative that 4 " drain would bubble up ~ a foot in the air ;-)

You needed a 12 ' step ladder inside the air handler to get at all the filters for a filter change. You could set the controls to allow being in the interstitial space ( to adust a tolerable static pressure there - just slightly negative ) to change filters while it was running. There no blowers in that section, it was just air-path.

The blower houses were divided into multiple parts, each partitioned off from the next by pressure-relief air-lock door sets so you could transistion from one to the next. You did NOT simply open the door against that kind of pressure !

I also by chance worked on the HVAC & security systems at the other site the first article mentions, the Nortel campus. I forget the size of the blowers, etc, but from memory the evaporator was ~ 20 - 30 feet wide, and ~ 20 feet high.

[.p.jm.]

I just did a Google Earth on the building - you can easily see the roof access between the units ( the smaller white square towards the front of the building ). It looks like each AHU was ~ 30 x 50 feet. The cooling towers are off to the left of the building.