Trading Floor Project - London

Project: Trading Floor Project – London, UK

System: CO₂OLdesk^TM plus Infrastructure and Services

Application: Investment Banking

• Installation completed during 2008 at the existing London headquarters of a major US banking institution.
• The modified use of existing floors, from normal office to trading environment, and the resultant substantial increase in personnel and PC equipment introduced higher than normal heat gains.
• An upgrade of the overhead room air conditioning was implemented, however the resultant increase in cooling required, along with the inherent increased air velocities from the existing terminal air devices resulted in conditions becoming too uncomfortable for the desk occupants.
• The client decided to look for an alternative means of offsetting the main source of heat load, and TROX was approached to provide a solution to absorb and contain the heat rejected from the Trader PC’s.
• The brief was to design a fully engineered solution that could be installed within the existing building infrastructure, and create a new slim line under-desk cooling unit that could be retrofitted within the existing desks.
• TROX designed, built and fully tested a new 80mm high CO2OLdeskTM unit that provided cooling for up to six high spec PC’s. The slim design included a substantial full length platform cover that also allowed PC’s to be placed directly on top of the unit. The unit incorporates twin EC low voltage recirculation fans, each powered via separately integrated control systems.
• Local and remote alarm components were included as standard.
• To ensure system and component resilience, the site infrastructure was upgraded to incorporate N+1, or where system requirements were more critical, N+N mechanical and electrical services.
• Project design specified that underdesk PC loads would be on average 1.2kW, although it was requested that the occasional ‘high end’ Trader would have the use of higher specification PC’s resulting in loads in excess of the standard desk option. The CO2OLdeskTM unit was therefore designed to adequately absorb 1.6kW’s of heat load.
• Total plant and infrastructure was designed to cope with 500kW’s of PC load from the two trading floors, and was able to serve a total of approximately 1000 traders. Full alarm and monitoring systems were also incorporated within the design, and were fully integrated into the existing site BMS.
• TROX worked with approved mechanical service suppliers and contractors, and were given 25 weeks to complete the work from order to handover. Full integrated service witness testing was completed at the request of the client, and the system and terminal units passed and exceeded the client’s expectations.