Space can be a challenge in any retrofit, especially in older buildings like Adelphi University. Adelphi University started out as Adelphi Academy which was founded in Brooklyn, New York, in 1863. It was a private preparatory school located in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn but later moved to Clinton Hill. In 1963, the New York State Board of Regents granted the college university status; the name was changed to Adelphi University. On the Garden City campus, many of the buildings are symmetrical because garden cities are typically planned this way. An example is Woodruff Hall has a second chimney solely to preserve the evenness of the building. The campus already had over 100 Belimo actuators installed and was very impressed with the reliability and efficient performance. In other buildings, they were in need of changing the building over from a pneumatic system to electronic actuation. Additional opportunities were to change out dozens of older generation actuators that were over 14 years old along with broken linkages on other systems to new replacement solutions.

 

“We had a very small footprint to work with,” Vito Civorelli, Manager, Maintenance and Repair. “We needed a solution that would be an easy replacement with the limited space and time to complete.” There were other advantages to using Renewal for this project—diversity of the system being one of them. Multiple outputs were required for full communication between the various valve actuators; 2-10 VDC, floating-point and on/off control, all of which Renewal could provide. “I believed the overall renovation would be challenging, with Renewal it was efficient and delivered a retrofit solution that made it easy,” stated Vito, whose firm had used Belimo valves and actuators for over 14 years. Now rid of the outdated, inefficient pneumatic control system and enjoying comfortable spaces year-round.

 

• Maximized installation efficiency and reduced operating costs.

• Replacement of pneumatic actuation with state of the art electronic actuation which increased operating performance and energy efficiency.

• Mitigated the risk of failing actuators that could lead to a loss of comfort.

• Achieve load distribution and eliminated the annoying flow noises with increased occupant comfort.