Success through teamwork for landmark California project

The Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center (ARTIC) is the Grand Central Station of the future. Centrally located in Orange County, California, ARTIC provides transportation service for three million local residents as well as 40 million annual visitors.

A LEED Platinum-certified building, the structure is 67,000 square feet with three levels, connecting people to a variety of transit options as well as entertainment, dining and retail locations.

“The ARTIC station is pretty monumental for the future,” said Paul Redgate, Pipe Fitting Superintendent for California Comfort Systems in San Diego. “It has multiple resources—a bus station, large parking facility for car pools. It’s the first of the high-speed rail stations that has been built today. The project itself was high profile for the city of Anaheim, much different than a typical install.”

ARTIC’s unique architecture includes a large number of windows and a dome-shaped structure, which results in high solar gains. Due to ARTIC’s unique architecture and size, controlling the climate inside the building with a conventional forced-air system would have been nearly impossible. Instead, HVAC designers for the project chose to implement a radiant heating and cooling system. Radiant cooling allows instantaneous removal of heat through absorption. Installing ViegaPEX™ Barrier tubing at tightly spaced increments (6 inches on-center) allows it to be within two inches of the finished surface floor, which gave the engineer the ability to immediately remove the solar sensible gain. For the ARTIC project, the cooling capacity ranges up to 40 btuh/sq. ft. This provides an energy savings of 34 percent over ASHRAE 90.1-2007.

“We installed 44,000 feet of in-slab heating and cooling pipe, 18 manifolds and 12 pumps,” Redgate said. “It was pretty large. This was our first radiant project of this size. We’ve done some smaller stuff but nothing on this scale.”

The ARTIC project marked California Comfort Systems’ first radiant heating and cooling project with Viega systems. It was also the first time the company worked hand-in-hand with Viega for the design of a project.

“From start to finish, from inception of the design to the commissioning, Viega was there by our side,” Redgate said. “Viega’s involvement was priceless; they didn’t just hand us the package and walk away. To have them out there all the way through to the end of the project was probably the best overall. And we still beat the industry average by 25 percent on the install.”

Viega offers radiant heating and cooling solutions that are easy to install. With simple connections and engineered system designs, Viega makes radiant heating and cooling projects easy, regardless of the project size. For more complicated, large-scale projects where the installers may not be totally confident, Viega offers training and assistance from start to finish.

“I can’t express enough how impressed I was with these guys who were paying attention to our project,” Redgate said. “Viega has a great team of people that are very passionate about their product.”

For more information, visit www.viega.us.