City Approves New HVAC Technology For City Hall

Cookeville City Council has approved an agreement to begin upgrading city hall’s 50-year-old HVAC system.

City Manager James Mills said the project stems from a study conducted at city hall last year.

“We retained the services of Maffet Loftis to evaluate how to best move forward with upgrading our system,” Mills said. “We had to decide whether or not to replace the existing chiller and boiler system or to go with a more modern technology. The consensus was to replace our current system with a system based on VRF, which is variable refrigerant flow technology.”

Mills said the VRF system allows temperature adjustment within zones of the building and should help lower the utility bill.

“We’re wanting to use a much more energy efficient system. It’s a VRF system, which is new to me, but that’s why we hired an engineer to study this for us,” Mills said. “We’re also going to get new windows. The windows will be much more efficient. It will cut our load down, or how much heat and air we have to buy. We expect to save quite a bit of money on our utility bill by going with this newer system.”

The $41,000 agreement allows Maffet Loftis to design, bid, and manage the upgrade of the HVAC system. Cookeville has budgeted $640,000 for the entire project.

Mills said the agreement also requires the project to be completed and operational by September 1, 2020.

“We hope to be able to do some phases prior to then so we can get some sort of relief by next summer,” Mills said. “The system has to be designed and built to accommodate city hall, but we hope it’s sooner than September 1st because it gets hot in here during the summer.”

City Council approved the agreement last week.