North Kellyville Public School - NSW

North Kellyville Public School is a purpose built learning environment that includes 40 new future-focused learning spaces and core facilities to accommodate 1,000 students. The school opened its doors to students for the first time earlier this year, with Hitachi VRF ensuring the students were nice and cool during the long hot summer.

The school was initially built with limited air conditioning in specific locations and gas heating throughout. Then Jay Smith, Project Manager for Fredon Air Service received a request to design and construct a complete reverse cycle refrigerated HVAC system. The school had just qualified for the Cooler Classrooms Program and the pressure was on to get it done before school started. (As part of the $500 million NSW government, schools in areas that have an average maximum January temperature of 30 degrees or more will automatically receive air conditioning.

A complete new approach was designed to meet the requirements from the NSW Department of Education. Fredon Air had just 2 months to complete these works from design stage to final fit off and commissioning. They designed a VRF concept with help from Hitachi, that was eventually approved and signed off by all relevant parties.

According to Jay, “Hitachi Commercial Specialist Greg Liolios and James Perram helped enormously with unit selection, on and off site technical support and fast tracked deliveries.”

Double ceilings, perforated and acoustic ceilings, that were previously installed made installation very difficult as they had to pull the suspended ceiling out to be able to run the piping and install the cassette units. However job was completed on time. Hitachi’s Technical Specialist Siva Suppramaniam from Temperzone was involved with the commissioning ensuring it all went smoothly. 

The school is a two storey rectangular building with a large courtyard in the middle. The teaching spaces are a range of large open plan areas that face into the courtyard and discrete classrooms that run along the outer perimeter of the building. Control for open plan spaces are done through touch screen controllers that are linked to up to 8 cassettes.

In each of the classrooms, units are controlled by a wall mounted controller. This includes a human activity sensor that shut the unit off if there is no movement in the space for a specified amount of time, a great energy saving feature. All the controllers are linked back to an offsite BMS via BACnet adapters ensuring a high level of connectability.