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Offices, retail, light industrial — and rooms where the air has to be quiet
Most commercial heating and cooling in Burbank is ordinary commercial heating and cooling. Then there is the part of it that is not, and that part is the reason this page exists.
Every unit found, identified and mapped to what it serves
On a building that has changed tenants two or three times, the roof holds a mixture of live plant, dead plant and units connected to nothing, and what serves what is rarely what anybody assumes. We produce a list: unit by unit, model and serial, measured condition, the zone it actually feeds, and whether it runs.
Then the readings that matter commercially: airflow and static pressure, refrigerant charge, economiser operation where one is fitted, filter condition and the pressure drop across it, belt and bearing condition, condensate drainage, and a combustion analysis on gas heat.
The survey is written so a facilities manager who has never been on the roof can use it, and so a landlord and a tenant can tell from it who is responsible for what.
Quiet air is a design problem, not a promise
What actually makes air noisy
Four things, in roughly this order: air moving too fast through a duct that is too small for it; fittings that make the air turn sharply; equipment mounted where its structure-borne vibration can get into the building; and diffusers chosen for looks rather than for the volume they are being asked to pass.
All four are decided at design and none of them is fixed afterwards by turning something down. A system running at half speed to be quiet is a system that is not conditioning the room.
What we will and will not claim
We will size ducts for velocity rather than for the smallest hole that fits, choose fittings and diffusers accordingly, site equipment away from the room, isolate it properly, and line what should be lined. We will measure sound pressure in the room before and after and give you both figures.
We will not certify a room to an acoustic standard. Room criteria, isolation of the structure itself and anything that has to be signed off belong to an acoustic consultant, and on a serious room they should be involved before we are.
What we do in premises
- Written plant survey
- Every unit found, identified, measured and mapped to what it serves, with abandoned plant marked as dead.
- Planned maintenance
- Scheduled visits, the same readings each time, written specifically enough that a lease obligation can be shown to have been met.
- Packaged unit repair and replacement
- Repair diagnosed and costed first. Replacement sized from the load the building carries now, with the curb, the roof opening and the crane access established before anything is ordered.
- Quiet air for production rooms
- Edit suites, audio bays, rehearsal and small stage spaces. Velocity, fittings, siting, isolation and lining, with measured sound pressure before and after.
- Zoning and controls
- Sensors where the complaints are, schedules set to the hours the building is actually used, economisers checked for whether they still move.
- Ventilation records
- Filter changes, airflow readings and dates, in a form that satisfies a tenant, a landlord or an inspector.
Work we turn down
- Acoustic certification. We build quiet air and we measure it. Signing a room off to a criterion is a consultant’s work and we will say so before we start, not after.
- Central chiller plant and cooling towers. A different discipline with different tickets. We are not going to learn it on your building.
- Proprietary building management system programming. We will work with the controls in front of us and tell you what a schedule is doing. Programming a manufacturer-locked system belongs to whoever holds the licence.
- Commercial refrigeration. Walk-ins, display cases and ice machines are adjacent and are not the same trade.
- Hood cleaning and fire suppression. Separate licensed jobs. We do the air balance around the hood.
- Roofing. We will not replace a rooftop unit over an active leak, and we will not patch the roof to get the job done.
Tell us the building
What it is used for, roughly how many units are on the roof, and where the complaints come from. 4111 W Alameda Ave, Burbank. Monday to Friday, 7.30am to 4.30pm.