Circle Reading Remodelling
The most recent work strand I’ve been involved with at BWL is the re-modelling of a private hospital in Reading. The hospital is owned and run by Circle who have a long term relationship with Bryden Wood Ltd (BWL). The requirement to re-model is based on Circle wanting to go into a joint venture with a German health care provide called Vamed. The plan is to hand two of the four floors of the existing hospital over to Vamed. This requires a number of rooms on the second floor to be changed. The client’s drivers are cost and time. Initially BWL priced the job at £90K for an architectural and M&E design role. The client currently doesn’t have a formal agreement in place with Vamed, so the real driver is to get the work done in order to seize a potential opportunity whilst spending as little cash as possible. This has led to a reduction in BWLs fee to £10K, which means BWL’s outputs are limited to a concept design which will be taken forward by the main contractor. I can understand the financial pressures the client is under, but it seems a little odd that the first interaction in a future strategic relationship is being done on a shoe string budget.
From an M&E perspective there are 2 engineers working on this project (1 electrical and 1 Mechanical). The limited budget means that this work needs to be turned around quickly, which is great for me as it’s another project under my belt for CPR.
What has my role been:
As the sole mechanical engineer working on the project I’ve been responsible for checking the implications of the changes of use on the mechanical system. This has entailed:
- Producing room data sheets for each area to define the environmental standards that need to be met (ventilation rates, temperature, acoustics, etc.)
- Using the data from the room datasheets to calculate loads for each area (cooling, heating, ventilation, domestic cold water, domestic hot water)
- Identify the best possible way to meet the new demands. As an example active chilled beams are utilised to provide comfort heating and cooling, where possible these have been retained, but where loads are too great or not close to the current distribution network other solutions have been provided.
- The impact of these solutions have then been confirmed: basically checking pressure drops in pipework and ductwork and making alterations where required.
- Engaging with my electrical and architectural colleagues to ensure that our designs are co-ordinate.
- This has then been pulled together into a scope of works, including mark-ups of existing schematics and schedules of new equipment so that the contractor can price the job and take the design forward.
All in all a good little project that has given me some solid B and D competencies. It’s probably worth noting that I found the calculations involved in conducting this work to be much simpler than those conduction for phase 1: phase 1 more than prepares you for the technical aspects of phase 3.
Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog 
Rich,
Reading between the lines I would have said you had gone from Concept to Developed design i.e. the ‘what systems will be employed’ has moved into the rules of thumb that say “based on these sweeping assumptions it will be about this big”. Keeping this broad brush, simple and with wriggle room for use at detailed design stage is exactly the right approach at Developed design. Phase 1 should allow you to take on the next stage and move from developed to detailed design, which is when things should get down and dirty with exact needs and numbers so more complex than you should have need for this. Incidentally I’m using RIBA Plan of Work as a reference, how did your contract define Concept? Big Stu has some interesting issues with this….
Richard,
Contract? That’d be nice. The client is a repeat customer, which is why things are probably being done a bit informally (although this seems to be the way BWL conduct their business).The scope of BWL’s works is based on an email from the client which is to, “review and progress with the design for the alterations to the heat and vent in the different locations”. I’ll be honest and say I hadn’t checked RIBA prior to stating our output was a Concept design. I’ve subsequently checked it and would still stand by our output being Concept: we’ve not started, nor are we going to start co-ordinating anything. I’ve also quickly run this past the mechanical engineer who is checking my work and he puts it at the concept stage, although we’ve done a little bit more than the bare minimum required.