Emergency Chiller Hire for Control Rooms: Beating the Heatwave for 999 Responders
The Challenge
When a 999 control room needed emergency chiller hire mid-heatwave, it couldn’t have come at a worse time. The site was in the grip of a mid-summer heatwave, with outside temperatures pushing the building’s ageing plant well beyond its limits.
This wasn’t a back-office comfort issue. The control room houses the operators and police officers who take and dispatch every 999 call, and the servers, radios and IT infrastructure that keep those calls connected. Without reliable cooling, both the equipment and the people relying on it were at risk of overheating.
The room needed to stay fully operational around the clock, whatever the weather was doing outside, and there was no option to wait for a permanent repair.
A temporary chiller hire was needed fast, and it had to deliver enough capacity to keep the room, its people and its critical systems running through the peak of the heatwave.
The Solution
We moved quickly to design a temporary cooling solution that could match the site’s demand without delay.
We supplied and installed:
- Two 70kW chillers for full redundancy and capacity
- Flexible hose connections for fast integration with the existing system
- Full delivery, positioning and commissioning
Our engineers connected the chillers into the existing pipework and had the system up and running with minimal disruption to a live, safety-critical environment. With 999 operators and police officers working around the clock, the installation had to happen without interrupting call handling.
The Result
Cooling was restored quickly, keeping the control room, its equipment and its people within safe operating temperatures for the rest of the heatwave.
There was no disruption to service, no downtime and no impact on the room’s ability to take and dispatch 999 calls.
“When you’re keeping a 999 control room running through a heatwave, there’s no margin for error. It’s about getting reliable cooling back on fast and knowing it won’t let you down. That’s exactly what we delivered here, with zero disruption to live operations.” – Connor Young, Installing Engineer on site
This project is a strong example of why temporary cooling isn’t just a stopgap, it’s a critical part of maintaining operational resilience when plant fails at the worst possible moment.
In this case, the requirement wasn’t just general comfort cooling. The system needed to protect both people and critical infrastructure in a live emergency service environment, with enough capacity and reliability to hold up through sustained heatwave conditions. That means consistent output, dependable controls and fast integration with existing infrastructure.
Two 70kW chillers were selected to match the site’s load with built-in redundancy. Getting that sizing right matters in temporary applications: undersized systems can’t keep pace with demand, while oversized equipment adds unnecessary cost and complexity. Pairing two units also meant we could maintain cooling even if one required servicing, something that carries real weight on a site that can never afford to go dark.
Because our chillers are built specifically for temporary deployment, they arrive fully packaged and pre-configured. That allows for fast connection into existing systems, whether via plate heat exchangers or direct integration, depending on the site setup. Flexible hose connections and adaptable controls mean we can work around a wide range of plant room configurations without major rework.
Reliability is designed in throughout. Our fleet is maintained to a high standard, regularly tested and ready for immediate mobilisation, which matters most during a heatwave when demand for emergency cooling spikes across the country. Each unit is capable of delivering consistent performance over extended hire periods, whether supporting a short-term breakdown or a longer replacement programme.
Beyond a single site, we operate a scalable fleet of temporary chillers, from smaller units for localised cooling through to high-capacity systems for large commercial and industrial sites. That means we can respond to everything from a single control room failure to multi-site cooling demands, combining units where needed to achieve the required output and redundancy.
For critical applications like emergency chiller hire for control rooms, that flexibility is essential. It allows us to tailor solutions around access constraints, load requirements and operational priorities, without compromising on performance or safety.
In short, this wasn’t just about getting the cooling back on. It was about delivering a properly engineered temporary system that our 999 operators and police officers could rely on, day and night, until permanent plant was back in place.
