Stan Sheriff Center is one of the most recognized buildings on campus. Today the Center stands as a testament to its namesake who was a towering figure in the history of UH Athletics. The distinctive dome structure shelters home court for the UH Athletics Department. Tens of thousands of fans attend live events here. When first built, the Center had two large constant volume chillers which could run only at full capacity. One chiller was not enough to keep the building cool, and two chillers running together was too much. If one chiller broke, costly emergency repairs had to be done and the arena had to be closed during the work. A plan to upgrade the HVAC system to make it more efficient and more reliable was done as part of a Repair and Maintenance project which replaced two large constant volume chillers with three smaller variable speed chillers, enabling the facility to ramp up when demand was high and throttle back when demand was low, as well as have redundancy in its N+1 configuration. If one chiller broke down the Center could run with the remaining two.
Components of the new system result in improved maintainability and reliability with many enhancements and energy efficient features such as:
- N+1 redundancy (normal operations)
- Increased Cooling Capacity (run all three if demand is high)
- Updated the chilled water system to a variable primary pumping system that allowed the cooling capacity to be closely matched to the cooling demand with Variable Speed Drives.
- Custom control algorithms were programmed to control the system to operate at peak efficiencies.