200kW Hospital Cooling Solution for Emergency Data Centre Failure
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The Challenge
The IT infrastructure manager at a private hospital group in the South East sent an urgent call. The dedicated precision cooling unit serving their on-site data centre had tripped on a refrigerant fault — and it wasn’t coming back up. Inside that server room sat the hospital’s EPR system, PACS imaging platform, theatre scheduling software, and nurse call infrastructure. Without cooling, inlet temperatures were already climbing past 27°C. At 35°C, automatic thermal shutdown would start pulling servers offline. Clinicians were mid-procedure. Radiology was mid-reporting. They had an estimated two-hour window before thermal shutdown risk.
This wasn’t a standard chiller hire scenario—they required rapid deployment with zero tolerance for downtime.
The Survey
Rapid Chillers’ dispatch team immediately initiated a remote assessment with the facilities manager, reviewing the server room layout, access, available power, and existing cooling setup. The building had a ground-floor external wall within 12 metres of the server room, a 63A three-phase isolator nearby, and enough clearance for ducted air delivery. With sufficient access and power confirmed, a unit was mobilised by 12:30.
The Solution
A 200kW chiller and a packaged air handling set configured for high-density server room environments. Rather than integrating with the failed chilled water circuit, the engineer configured a standalone ducted arrangement: cool air delivered directly into the underfloor plenum via a floor void, with a return path through the existing blanking panel layout. No pipework modifications and no downtime risk to adjacent clinical areas.
The unit was commissioned and delivering conditioned air by 15:40 — less than four hours from the first call. Inlet temperatures across the server racks stabilised at 19°C within 45 minutes. As part of our temporary chiller hire service, the engineer remained on-site for a further two hours to monitor performance and hand over full operational guidance to the in-house team.
The Result
All critical systems remained online throughout. Not a single EPR record was lost, no imaging workflow was interrupted, and theatre operations continued without pause. The IT manager later described the response as “frankly unbelievable —we had expected a partial shutdown.”
The temporary cooling arrangement ran for 19 days while the original precision unit was repaired, and a secondary backup system was specified and procured. Total downtime in the server room: zero minutes.
For hospitals and healthcare estates teams who can’t afford downtime, Rapid Chillers provides rapid-response chiller hire solutions across the UK. This deployment highlights the critical role of rapid-response cooling in protecting mission-critical healthcare IT infrastructure.
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