What are VAV's?

[jackmack]

I am assuming VAV's are related to duct work. I work in a commercial office building and had the engineer come out to check the computer room. The room appears to generate a lot of heat. The contract calls for the room to be separately zoned. The engineer said the room's HVAC was shared with 2 other rooms. He said the room had a VAV that could be closed off which would prevent some of the heat from other areas. To me, this is not separately zoned. What do you think?

[mikelcs]

1 VAV = 1 zone. they should remove the ducts in your server room from the existing VAV and add a cooling only box to serve your server room.you may want to check your lease, if there is an unoccupied time specified for the building, the house air will shut down and you'll need to look at another solution to provide 24 hour cooling.

[dngrsone]

VAV means Variable Air Volume. As michelcs said, each VAV box should be its own zone. If your computer room doesn't have its own VAV, programmed accordingly, then you are going to have problems.

Most of the jobs I have done have called for a dedicated split AC for each computer room.

[ericnyc]

Variable Air Volume. There is control over the amount of air being distributed in a particular zone. In an office situation, you may have one vav control one "zone" along the perimeter of the building. That zone has a stat in the corner office, hence the person in the corner office controls the volume of air for the whole zone if he/she is too warm/cold etc. You can have these controls hooked up to a bms as well. As for a computer room I've seen many situations where the building is feeding the room with building air through a vav and a supplemental unit. Most of the time however comp rooms are fed with a supplemental.

[jackmack]

Thanks, that explains a lot. Future offices will more than likely require separate AC units but this contract from 4 years ago required separate thermostatic control within the room independent of the house system and me thinks I will be engaged in a contract violation.

[snipe70e]

Thanks, that explains a lot. Future offices will more than likely require separate AC units but this contract from 4 years ago required separate thermostatic control within the room independent of the house system and me thinks I will be engaged in a contract violation.


Are you the tenant or the property manager?

Unlesss your building is occupied 24/7 at nights and weekends the building system should shut down. If the server room is generating a lot of heat you are going to need a seperat system for the room. Putting in a seperate VAV zoned only to the server room will not work unless the building is running 24/7

[nascarwc88]

I've seen only a couple of places trying to cool a server room with only a vav system. Most have another source of cooling. Hard to talk the building owner into running a 250 ton chiller 24/7. (in a 10 story building [I] take care of).

[hvac_superman]

http://www.liebert.com/