Silicon Oasis — is the district cooling or my FCU the reason a couple of rooms never get cold?
In our Silicon Oasis place a couple of rooms never really get cold while the rest are fine. It's the district cooling setup with the fan-coil units rather than normal splits. I can't tell whether it's the building's cooling not delivering to those rooms or whether my own units are the problem, and I don't want to call the wrong people. How do you work out which side the fault is on?
2 answers
Good instinct to split the question before calling, because building-side and unit-side faults go to different people. With district cooling through FCUs, the quick triage is this: if ALL your rooms are weak together, suspect the building chilled-water supply or your flat's main valve/strainer; if only a COUPLE of rooms are weak while others are fine on the same supply, it's almost certainly those individual FCUs, a clogged coil or filter, a stuck valve, or airflow, not the district cooling. Since only a couple of your rooms are affected, the odds are firmly on your own FCUs. Check the obvious first: are those units' filters clean, is the condensate draining, do the grilles blow much weaker than the good rooms. If they're clean and still weak, the FCU coil, its control valve or the strainer feeding it is the likely culprit. Al Ghubaiba's maintenance team can meter the flow to those specific units and confirm whether it's the FCU or, less likely here, the supply, so you're not chasing the building management for something inside the flat.
This matches ours, two weak rooms turned out to be FCU strainers half blocked, nothing to do with the building supply. Metering the flow to each unit is what proved it. Saved a pointless argument with the district cooling provider.
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