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HVAC Provider:
Hydro-Temp
Corporation
P. O. Box 566
Pocahontas, AR 72455
Contact: Mike Jones
1-800-382-3113
Design Engineer:
ZDS Design /
Consulting Services
112 Smiley Drive
St. Albans, WV 25177
Contact: Todd Zachwieja
1-304-755-0075
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The heating and cooling units manufactured for Webster County High School are among the most unique earth coupled units ever designed. Hydro-Temp Corporation, a twenty-year-old manufacturer of custom-built heat pumps, worked closely with Zachwieja Design/Consulting Services to produce the 484 tons of equipment that would meet the many uncommon requirements of the Webster County High School building.
Perhaps of greatest concern was the need to custom-build the units to fit the existing roof curb specifications. By doing so, costly alterations to the integrity of the roof could be avoided. Building the units to fit the existing roof curbs eliminated most of the problems--except one. Many of the roof curbs near the outside of the building had supported units that conditioned classrooms on the interior, as well as the outside perimeter, of the building. In the past, the only possible way to condition these dissimilar areas with only one unit was with a large amount of very inefficient reheat. Zachwieja Design Services asked Hydro-Temp Corporation to design and build a housing that would sit on one curb, but contain two individual units--one unit for each dissimilar zone.
A common need of any school is make-up air. To solve this problem, Zachwieja Design Services instructed Hydro-Temp to incorporate air-to-air heat exchangers into the units' design while they were being built. These air-to-air heat exchangers recouped as much as 70% of the heating/cooling normally associated with the make-up air. Using Zachwieja's design, Hydro-Temp has (in many cases) combined make-up air-to-air heat exchangers with economizers capable of bringing up to 100% outside air using modulating dampers.
It was also necessary to build units capable of providing load matching to supply plenty of capacity during the temperature extremes of summer and winter, and still provide lower capacities at a high efficiency during normal weather. Hydro-Temp accomplished this by installing two compressors with different capacities on the same refrigerant circuit of each unit, allowing each unit to have three different capacities with which to match the building's heating/cooling load. A good example of this was the 15 ton unit. This unit had a 5 and 10 ton compressor installed on the same refrigerant circuit. The majority of the unit's running time occurs in the 5 ton mode, which allows a 5 ton compressor to exchange heat with oversized (20 ton) heat exchangers while running on low blower speed. By combining this compressor to heat exchanger ratio with geothermal exchange, some of the nation's most efficient units have been created.
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