The Air Conditioning has Failed, Again. Whose Fault is it?

Session 3 Paper 2, CIBSE Technical Symposium, John Moore’s University, Liverpool
11-12 April 2013

Air conditioning systems fail from time to time, or fail to provide the comfort conditions the users expect. The consequences can mean significant financial cost or losses for some of the parties involved in delivering the system. In these cases the parties usually want to find out what went wrong, what caused the problem and perhaps more importantly who was responsible, and may have to pay for remedial works or compensate for losses. This paper overviews some real life cases where air conditioning has failed to either perform reliably or meet the agreed performance specification. These cases include:

- A film archive where more heat and moisture came out of the air conditioning system than went in;
- A large office building where chillers started to fail after running for only 12 months and continued to be replaced for several years before the cause was identified;
- A large chilled water system that was corroding beneath the insulation for 10 years before the corroded pipes started leaking.