Florida Data Centre finds security with PP-R piping system

There’s nothing more catastrophic for a business than a major data loss. In February 2014, CxP Data centers in Jacksonville, Forida, opened a state-of-the-art 120,000-sq-ft retrofitted center to provide dependable, reliable security for any organization’s most valuable information 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year.

Among a myriad of other services, such as data recovery, business-continuity planning and cloud computing, CxP’s physical location solutions require a great deal of space, power and cooling to house, store, and protect any firm’s most precious asset.

To help keep all of its powerful equipment cool, CxP needed a chilled-water piping system that was just as safe and secure as its systems.

“If the servers get hot, they go down, and that’s bad news for the client. So, it’s extremely important that the room stays cool and there are no leaks,” said Glen Drummond Jr., product manager of the Jacksonville branch for Ferguson Enterprises.

PP-R Piping Produces Quick Results

“There was a lot of pipe to put together in a short amount of time. With steel, we would have been working two shifts, 24 hours a day. We were really trying to step it up for the client because the timing was critical to their survival” said Marc Hirst, Project Manager for The Haskell Company, a design-build firm.

Aquatherm PP-R piping systems as a quicker, leak-free solution was suggested seeing the potential for significant labor and time savings using PP-R.

By choosing Aquatherm, CxP also was able to save time simply because PP-R piping is so much lighter than steel. Additionally, dealing with heavy pipe can create safety issues. “I really love the safety aspect of Aquatherm,” Hirst said. “The pipe weighs virtually nothing. If you drop it, it’s not going to hurt anybody.”

Heat Fusion Allows Indoor Installation

To build CxP’s chilled-water system, Jacksonville mechanical contractor JAX Refrigeration used approximately 1,200 ft of Aquatherm Blue pipe. The pipe was selected as it is specifically engineered for heating and cooling, industrial, geothermal and compressed-air applications. All of Aquatherm’s PP-R piping systems are made of a simple, chemically stable thermoplastic that is non-corroding, so it won’t wear out, weaken, or clog after a few years. The material won’t react with water or most dissolved chemicals, so it won’t scale or erode—problems that cause the majority of long-term piping failures.

Because Aquatherm’s heat fusion connections do not require flames or produce fumes or gases, two installers were able to put the system together and immediately make any required adjustments onsite.

Reliable Piping System Surprises Installers

To test for leaks, the JAX Refrigeration left 100 psi of compressed air in the piping system for nine days. “You expect at least some leaks—you expect to have to go back and change something,” Drummond said. But even with 500 individual joints, “there were zero leaks. The Aquatherm system didn’t lose any air. I actually asked the installers, If you had to work with one material forever on every project, would you rather work with steel or Aquatherm? And they all said Aquatherm,” he said. “It’s one thing if everybody loves working with it, but that means nothing if there are a bunch of leaks. But we didn’t fail any of our pressure tests. Everything passed right away.”

The Aquatherm installation began the first week of December 2013 and was completed almost exactly a month later.  CxP already is planning on using Aquatherm piping systems in Phase 2 of the project.