Is this even possible?

[Dillon]

I'm the technical director at a performing arts facility, and the owner is getting married in mid-June. He wants to use one of the facility's dance studios as a temporary cold room to store about 1M dollars worth of flowers for the wedding. The room is enormous, plenty of large windows, a couple of exterior doors, a 25' ceiling... The room needs to be at about 50 deg. Fahrenheit for about a week. His thought is that the cooling system in place can get us at least part of the way there, and that portable coolers will do the rest. He expects to have to cover windows and seal the doors a little better, but after looking into this idea more closely, it seems that there is WAY more to it than that. I'm not a DIYer looking for instructions, I just want to know if his idea even worth pursuing. I mean, could it possibly be as simple as that? Everything I've gleaned so far involves serious redesigning and retro-fitting of the existing space. I would hate to hire someone who thinks they can do this project simply only to have 1M dollars worth of exotic flowers shrivel up and die on the wedding day!

[just_opinion]

I guess it is his wedding days so he cannot think straight. Or maybe he spent all his money on the flower and has nothing left to spend on keeping them fresh :D

Best to have rent a place to keep them. They do make portable cooler with 100% back-up and phone dial out if ONE system is in trouble. Unless there is NO POWER at all to the portable cooler :cool:

Money can buy anything man ;)

[mgibbs]

sounds like a job for Aggreko..

[Tech Rob]

It can be done, but...

1) Not by using the existing air conditioning system

2) Not inexpensively.

[Wheelbaron]

Cheaper and smarter to rent the cold storage space. Why not go with the place they are buying the flowers through, have them recommend a storage?

[ControlsManPlus]

The current cooling system is not designed to go below 68*F before freezing up. Below that there will need to be reheat to keep the evap. from freezing. The extra cooling units will probably just quicken the existing system to getting to this frozen coil state.

[drivewizard]

This is a joke, right? If not, my God, 1 Mil on flowers and he doesn't want to spend 1/100th of that on storage? Just a guess, but I wouldn't think it would be over 10-15 thousand $ to store them for a week.

Plus, your dance studio probably has some wood floors in there somewhere.
If you lower the temp to 50 for a week, you probably would get some warping.shrinkage,expanding, buckling, etc.
Not to mention all the other issues raised previously.

People with money can be SO stupid sometimes. It cracks me up.

[blue32]

Low TD = big, wet ,and sloppy

I could be wrong (happened once in the late 80's) but humidity is the big concern here, massive humidifier and low velocity cooler should be just what the doctor ordered.

[Dillon]

Thanks a lot, guys. Lots of great insight. I sure appreciate it!