The Surgery Center of Lynchburg is a popular alternative for inpatient and hospital outpatient surgery in the Lynchburg, Virginia area. However, the Center’s aging mechanical, HVAC, and Building Automation System (BAS) caused operating room conditions to become unsuitable, leading to rescheduled surgeries and frustrated patients.
The Center partnered with Moore’s Electrical & Mechanical to restructure its systems and implement a new building automation system that offered greater flexibility, accuracy, and reporting.
Tackling Hurdles To Improve Mechanical Systems
Since operating rooms require precise humidity and temperature levels, they need to be monitored daily to provide a safe environment for surgeries. With their old system, a staff member of The Surgery Center was required to physically visit each room to manually record and log these conditions. It was time consuming and ineffective.
Moore’s understood the complexity of their situation and the need for these mechanical controls systems to be operating at peak performance. To effectively monitor these levels, the use of a reliable building automation system is critical to understanding trends and providing system programming to control space requirements and parameters.
With proper programming, we knew we could provide a central Building Automation System that would satisfy the requirements of operation room standards in a single location without needing to manually check these requirements:
- Positive air pressure relationship to adjacent areas
- Minimum outdoor air exchange 4 per hour
- Minimum total air exchange 20 per hour
- Maximum relative humidity 60%
- Temperature range 72 ro 78 F
Challenges to overcome in the upgrade:
The Center’s mechanical systems needed to be operational throughout the upgrade to ensure surgeries continued to run as scheduled.
- The upgrade had to be done without any downtime or interrupting daily business operations.
- The efficiency of monitoring each space and its requirements needed to be improved
- The new system had to integrate seamlessly with the current equipment
Moore’s Approach
We implemented an open protocol controls system that resolved these challenges. The team worked on nights and weekends to minimize downtime, custom-designed 3D graphics for the facility for easy monitoring, and ensured the Johnson FX JACE integrated with the existing system while handling new air handlers, a new boiler, and chiller, new pumps, and VAV controls.
Reaping The Benefits Of Optimized Efficiency & Control
After the installation of the new Building Automation System, the Surgery Center could:
- monitor and remotely update control settings from anywhere
- receive daily reporting stats
- have the capability to handle equipment errors and issues.
The new system saved time and reduced schedule interruptions, minimized the loss of service, and implemented a full plan to combat potential issues before they happen.
With these updates, the Surgery Center now has complete control of its operation system.
“The decision to switch [to a new system], for the money, gave us the most bang for our buck. It had all the things we needed it to have. And for me, having the people [at Moore’s] I know I can call, anyone is there for me — that for me is huge.
I sleep better at night … the new system is easy to use and more cost-effective.”
Juli Wingfield, Clinical Resource Coordinator and Facilities Manager
Building Automation Systems: Enhancing Operations & Ensuring Long-Term Success
With the implementation of new mechanical systems and HVAC services, the Surgery Center of Lynchburg improved its operations and became more efficient. With the upgrade, the Center can easily expand its system and make changes to its HVAC controls without being locked into working with a specific provider. The Surgery Center’s partnership with Moore’s Electrical & Mechanical was beneficial for both parties, and we hope this case study can serve as an inspiration for other businesses looking to improve their mechanical systems!
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