Case Studies - Cooling the Primary School

Suffolk County Council approached Cool-Tech Ltd to tackle excessive heat in classrooms at Boxford Primary School near Lavenham in Suffolk.

Their first floor classrooms were unusable during afternoons in the summer term due to excessive solar gain and natural latent heat build up.

During these summer months the children were taken outside to the playing field for afternoon lessons.

To overcome this problem Cool Technology were commissioned to design an Ecocooling evaporative cooling solution. The upstairs classrooms were fed via ceiling diffusers from the large ceiling void to which the system provided large quantities of fresh filtered, cooled external air, creating a pleasant comfortable teaching environment. Using open windows as natural extract the rooms purged with a continuous pressurised supply of cold fresh air dropping previously recorded temperatures in excess of 35 to 40 degrees to a pleasant 22 to 25 degrees centigrade.

In manual operation there are five fan speeds and the option of pure ventilation or evaporative cooling. In automatic mode a combined thermostat/humidistat automatically controls the operation of the EcoCooler to achieve a set classroom temperature. This resulted in the cooler mainly running at around speed 2 to 3 with the cooling section only operational in the summer months.

An inline damper and second duct feed provided fresh air to ground floor classrooms as the Ecocooler capacity by far exceeded the 8 to 12 air changes per hour required to keep the building cool. Head teacher Rob Giles and his staff have noted a marked improvement not only in the ambient conditions but in the Children’s well-being, attentiveness and alertness during their afternoon lessons which was a very different story before the system was installed.