Seattle Municipal Tower Chiller Replacement

The Seattle Municipal Tower Chiller Plant and Condenser Replacement projects are an essential part of the City of Seattle's capital maintenance and energy efficiency goals. Working closely with the City, CBRE, and sub-consultant team, Miller Hayashi started our design effort by evaluating the building to identify efficient strategies to reduce and stabilize the load. A series of upgrades and replacements to the 30-year old air handling, chilled water plant, and building management controls systems have been implemented with minimal interference to the 5,000+ occupants.

These improvements will reduce overall energy usage through higher performance equipment and improved building programing to take advantage of nighttime air flushing and demand load delivery. A key part of the strategy was to replace the interior cooling towers with more efficient units on top of the 6th Ave parking garage. Highly visible from I-5 and the surrounding buildings, a custom perforated screen and frame system was developed to integrate the equipment at a scale appropriate to the building. An abstracted pattern of varying hole sizes was designed to create a subtle image of waves, representative of the both the nearby waterfront and the evaporative cooling process of the towers behind.

The project also included weatherization upgrades. The Miller Hayashi assembled a sub-consultant team to prepare a capital plan of life-cycle upgrades for the 62-story tower. The project cataloged building forensic assessments, prioritized an implementation plan, and prepared budget level cost analysis for the $26M refurbishment of the primary envelope assemblies.

Current capital improvements to the building include the replacement of the building’s chilled water system, including replacement of all of the valves throughout the tower, three 1,000 ton chillers, and all associated piping and controls located on the 14th floor.