Keeping a Crown Court Cool: 550kW Chiller Hire in a Tight City Site
The Challenge
When the cooling system at a Crown Court failed, the site itself was the hardest part of the job. Courtrooms, offices and public waiting areas all needed cooling restored fast, but the building sat in a tight city centre location with restricted street access, parked vehicles and neighbouring rooflines close on all sides. A standard delivery route wasn’t an option.
The court had cases booked back-to-back and no capacity to pause proceedings. We needed a chiller hire solution that could handle the building’s full cooling load and reach a genuinely difficult city centre site without disrupting the street below.
This wasn’t just an office comfort issue. Overheating courtrooms put staff and defendants at risk and slow hearings down. With cases booked back-to-back, the court couldn’t halt proceedings to wait for a permanent repair.
The site itself added another layer of complexity. Located in a tight city centre setting, with restricted street access, parked vehicles and neighbouring buildings close on all sides, getting a replacement cooling system into position was never going to be straightforward.
A temporary chiller hire was needed fast, and it had to be capable of handling the full cooling load for the building while being manoeuvred into a genuinely difficult city centre location.
The Solution
We specified and delivered a solution sized to match the building’s full demand, engineered around the access constraints of a live city centre site.
We supplied and installed:
- A 550kW temporary chiller to cover the court’s full cooling load
- Specialist crane lifting to manoeuvre the unit over the street and into position
- Flexible hose connections for fast integration with the existing system
- Full delivery, positioning and commissioning
The building had no direct access route, so a crane lifted the chiller over the street and neighbouring rooflines, clearing parked traffic and pedestrians below. Our engineers and specialist lifting contractors planned the route, closed off road space and set the unit down without a hitch.
Once in position, our engineers connected the chiller into the existing system, restoring cooling across the courtrooms, offices and waiting rooms without interrupting the court’s schedule.
The Result
Cooling was restored across the building, keeping courtrooms, offices and public waiting areas comfortable and allowing the court to continue operating as normal.
There was no disruption to hearings, no downtime and no impact on the court’s daily schedule, despite one of the more challenging installations our team has taken on.
“City centre sites like this one don’t leave much margin for error. Getting a 550kW chiller safely over a live street and into position takes serious planning, but that’s exactly what this kind of job demands. The result was cool courtrooms and a court that never had to skip a beat.” – Ben Goodridge, Sales Engineer
Chiller Hire for Restricted Access City Centre Sites
This project is a strong example of how temporary cooling has to flex around the realities of the site, not the other way round, something that’s especially true across public sector and government buildings, where downtime simply isn’t an option.
In this case, the requirement wasn’t just raising a large chiller into place, it was doing so above a live city street, with tight clearances, restricted access and no room for error. That’s where experience in specialist lifting and site logistics becomes just as important as the cooling equipment itself.
A 550kW chiller was selected to match the building’s full cooling demand across courtrooms, offices and public areas, giving the site consistent performance without the short cycling or inefficiency that comes from an undersized system.
Because our chillers are built specifically for temporary deployment, they arrive fully packaged and pre-configured, allowing for fast connection into existing systems once in position. Flexible hose connections and adaptable controls mean we can integrate with a wide range of plant room configurations, whatever the building.
We maintain every unit in our fleet to a high standard, so it’s ready to mobilise fast. On difficult-access sites, we bring in specialist lifting partners to plan installations that keep occupiers, the public and passing traffic moving. Our fleet ranges from small units for localised cooling to high-capacity systems like this one, sized for large public and commercial buildings. That means we can respond to sites of any size, in any location, including the most constrained city centre settings.
For critical public sector and government buildings like a Crown Court, that combination of capacity and careful logistics is essential. It allows us to deliver a properly engineered temporary cooling system that keeps a live building running, whatever the access challenges on the day.
