Dolphin Retrofits Chiller Plant Exchangers Across Hospital Campus

A hospital campus running an ageing central chiller plant needed its heat exchange equipment retrofitted for efficiency and reliability, but the facility could not accept a shutdown of the cooling loads serving operating theatres and critical care areas at any point during the works — a hospital chiller plant does not get the luxury of a single planned outage window the way an industrial plant does.

Dolphin phased the retrofit across the plant's redundant chiller trains, taking one train offline at a time while the remaining capacity carried the campus's critical load, with each phase's scope sized to what the standing redundant capacity could safely absorb rather than to a fixed calendar target.

Each phase included a load test on the remaining online trains before work began on the next, confirming standing capacity was actually sufficient for the critical load rather than assuming it from the plant's original design margin — a hospital's tolerance for a cooling shortfall in a critical area is effectively zero.

The full campus retrofit was completed in phases without a single interruption to critical cooling loads, leaving the facilities team with a modernised chiller plant and a phased handover record their next capital planning cycle could build on.