23 Mar 2022

Patients, staff, and visitors at Taunton’s Musgrove Park Hospital's Jubilee Building will benefit from comfortable, stable indoor environmental conditions provided by two high-performance Carrier 30RQM AquaSnap® air-to-water heat pumps, powered by quiet-running scroll compressors. Carrier is part of Carrier Global Corporation, the provider of healthy, safe, sustainable, and intelligent building and cold chain solutions.

Carrier supplied the high-efficiency heat pumps to installer RTS Engineering as part of an urgent response following the failure of the hospital's existing chiller during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The rapid response was enabled by Carrier's policy of maintaining stock of popular models for immediate delivery.

Personal protective equipment

The Carrier heat pumps serve three wards and 112 en-suite bedrooms in the hospital's three-storey Jubilee Building. The bedrooms are designed to give patients greater control over their immediate environment, including temperature, lighting, and privacy, to empower them and help support a healing environment. Ventilation and cooling are also critical to prevent overheating of clinical areas where ventilators are in use and hospital staff wear personal protective equipment.

The heat pumps were commissioned by Carrier Commercial Service with the installation supported by a Carrier BluEdge™ Digital service agreement. BluEdge Digital connects customers’ equipment to Carrier’s cloud-based IoT platform, providing them with advanced analytics and actionable insights to visualize, advise and optimize machine health and life cycle outcomes.

Independent refrigeration circuits

RTS Engineering worked closely on the project with ClearLead Consulting

Musgrove Park Hospital can remotely access operating data, alarm history, and monthly reports via the internet, and Carrier specialists review and diagnose machine health to reduce unplanned maintenance costs, and in the case of false alarms, save them the cost of a site visit.

The AquaSnap unit delivers 226kW of heating and 197kW of cooling via two independent refrigeration circuits, each with two scroll compressors, providing a high degree of resilience in the unlikely event of failure. RTS Engineering worked closely on the project with ClearLead Consulting, which specified the requirements for the replacement and managed the detailed logistics for the removal of the previous equipment and crane-lift of the Carrier unit into position.

Competitive installation costs

"We have worked with Carrier for many years and are familiar with the excellent design and high-quality build of their chillers and heat pumps,” said Kevin Shorthouse, Director, RTS Engineering.

Carrier had stock at the factory in France and supplied the equipment at short notice, enabling us to meet the hospital's urgent need for a replacement during a particularly busy time." The AquaSnap 30RQM heat pump is a compact all-in-one package designed for applications where building owners require competitive installed costs, optimal performance, and proven reliability.