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Swanson Rink Sponsors Annual VOA Bannock Youth Center Recognition Event

For the third year in a row, Swanson Rink sponsored the Bannock Youth Center’s Recognition Event at Moe’s BBQ and Bowling. The event had a great turnout, and five participants were recognized for their extraordinary achievement, and two participants celebrated their graduations!

The Bannock Youth Center provides living skills, leadership training, mentoring, and resources to youth in the Volunteers of America transitional living programs. Swanson Rink has been an active member of this organization for over 10 years.

Swanson Rink Completes Design for Tier III Certified Data Center

This Confidential Data Center was built to function as a standalone computing center with the capability to expand power and cooling capacity to support the Client’s IT growth for the next ten years. The ITCC was designed to specifically ensure physical integrity and high availability of the computing environment resolving operational risks that had been present in the previous facilities.

Swanson Rink provided mechanical and electrical engineering design services for this facility, which is only the 23rd data center to receive the Uptime Tier III Constructed Facilities certification in the United States.

The 55,000 square foot data center includes 12,000 square feet of computer room, additional spaces for power and cooling infrastructure, storage, staging and other logistics spaces, and approximately 5,000 square feet of administrative area for assigned personnel. In addition to mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineering services, Swanson Rink provided initial consulting on the Program Definition to help the Client define their specific space, infrastructure, and operational needs for the project.

Swanson Rink found this project to be full of unique electrical challenges, and therefore, equally unique solutions. Sizing of the electrical components making up the distribution paths was based on an ultimate computer load of 2,900 kW comprising 320 equipment cabinets rated 8 kW each (2,560 kW) plus 340 kW of network load. The first challenge was providing electrical distribution systems that would meet the Uptime Tier III requirement for concurrent maintainability, providing a system with minimal complexity, while still meeting the space and budget constraints of the project. These requirements met a design concept that used three completely separate distribution systems, any two of which could support all the data center critical loads. This design eliminated the need for paralleling switchboards and greatly simplified the electrical control schemes.

To further facilitate operations, a highly comprehensive electrical system color scheme was used. Swanson Rink developed a color scheme for conduits that met the owner’s requirement to visually distinguish the system wiring (power, control, fire alarm, data, etc.) contained in each conduit. The requirement included distinguishing the source of power for each load and identification of the equipment associated with each distribution system. Swanson Rink resolved these requirements by using commercially available colored conduits. For conduits containing power wiring, solid colors were used to indicate the power source was from a UPS system, while galvanized conduit with colored labels was used to identify the source as non-UPS. The color scheme also utilized colored conduit labels and colored equipment nameplates for each distribution system. The owner carried the color identification further by having the doors to the UPS and generator rooms painted to match the system in the room.

The largest challenge mechanically was achieving the Uptime Tier III rating for the data center when major components of the continuous cooling were being designed by another firm (including the chilled water and fuel-oil that were supplied from a 5,000 ton central plant). This required intense coordination during design and construction to ensure that the Tier III rating was not compromised by decisions made by either firm.

One of the other unique aspects of the Data Center was the owner’s requirement of no facility maintenance personnel on the data center floor during operation. To meet this requirement, Swanson Rink created a mechanical gallery in the middle of the data center floor that housed all the floor mounted CRAC units and two electrical galleries on either end of the data center to house PDUs, transformers and electrical panels. This required analyzing the operation and maintenance requirements of each system and including details in the construction documents that specifically addressed these requirements. The fully coordinated 3-D construction drawings included details as finite as the locations and installation techniques of the fire smoke damper actuators to ensure there was never a need for the maintenance personnel to enter the data center.

The mechanical equipment in the data center was designed to match the electrical design concept. There are three primary cooling systems designed so that any two of the systems will support the load at the full. Each system is comprised of the following primary elements; heat exchanger, a primary pump, secondary pump and chilled water storage tank all of which is installed in the data center. This design approach will make trouble shooting during an emergency easier, and quicker, for the operators.

Swanson Rink received full accolades for design from the Client, and they had the following to say about Swanson Rink: “Thank you for your expert guidance and stewardship through this project.”

Swanson Rink Awarded 2014 Denver International Airport On-Call

Swanson Rink has been awarded the $2,000,000 Mechanical On-Call contract at Denver International Airport (DIA). The On-Call includes mechanical design services for miscellaneous engineering tasks which may include upgrades and replacement of sanitary sewer systems, communication rooms cooling, domestic water system improvements, etc. The work is anticipated to start in fall 2014 with a scheduled duration of two years.

Swanson Rink provided the original design of the mechanical, electrical, telecommunications and security systems for the concourses, in addition to providing various design services over the years on multiple on-call contracts. Swanson Rink is currently completing mechanical, electrical, telecom, security and fueling system design for the DIA Concourse C Expansion.

Swanson Rink Volunteers at the Phoenix CANSTRUCTION Event

Our Swanson Rink Phoenix employees volunteered at the 8th annual of the Phoenix CANSTRUCTION event benefitting St. Mary’s Food Bank. CANSTRUCTION is an international community service event, where design teams compete to build structures entirely out of canned food! We were teamed up with DWL Architects and Mortenson Construction for this event and entered the structure titled “The Ripple Effect”. We had a great time and are looking forward to participating again next year!

Swanson Rink Makes ENR’s Top 10 List for Data Center Design

Congratulations to Swanson Rink for making ENR’s Top 10 List in the Data Center design category! Swanson Rink continues to take on challenging and exciting data center work, including our most recently completed projects, Chesapeake Energy Data Center, ViaWest ComPark Data Center, and ViaWest Chaska Data Center.

In addition, Swanson Rink was named in the Top 5 MEP firms in Colorado/Wyoming.

If you would like to be a part of our award-winning team, please visit us our careers page!

2nd Annual Kickball Tournament: Huge Success

Swanson Rink’s 2nd Annual kickball tournament benefiting the Volunteers of America’s Bannock Youth Center was a huge success, nearly doubling in size from the inaugural event, with over 170 players participating from 16 teams. Through this fundraiser, Swanson Rink was able to raise over $3,500 for the Bannock Youth Center ‘Superior Standards’ Scholarship Fund, and a large part of this was due to the generous raffle prizes we received from area donors.

The Bannock Youth Center is operated by Volunteers of America, a non-profit organization in Denver, CO, committed to helping disadvantaged youth, as well as their young children, become independent, contributing members of society. The youth served are formerly homeless and very low income and would be unable to attend trade school or college without scholarship assistance.

A big thank you to the all the teams that participated. We had several teams join us for the 2nd year in a row which included RJM Construction, Mortenson Construction, VOA, Iron Horse Architects, Gensler, and the returning champs: Snitches Get Stitches. These teams were joined by new competition from Dynalectric, Howell Construction, HPE, Saunders Construction, Braconier, and multiple teams formed from Swanson Rink’s friends, families, and employees.

Finally, congratulations to the winning team, Red Ball & Vodka! We are looking forward to seeing everyone again at next year’s tournament!

Swanson Rink’s Steve Bennett Finishes Second at WOT Race

Steve Bennett, Vice President of Aviation Services has been involved in the competitive cycling arena for over 20 years. He started out as a mechanic for his daughter who was the one that initially had an interest in cycling. While he was in his 40’s he would participate in “dad’s races” that took place as part of his daughter’s competitions, but after a couple of years Steve’s daughter lost interest in the sport. This is when he really began to get in to the world of competitive cycling; starting at the Masters 45+ age group. Although cycling keeps Steve healthy and fit, his main reason for competing is because it’s FUN. He enjoys the fact that strategy weighs heavy on his chances to win. Being an engineer for the last 35 years gives Steve an advantage when it comes to effectively strategizing. Since Steve has been racing with many of the same guys for almost 20 years he has learned their strengths and weaknesses and use them to his advantage. (Of course that goes both ways.)

Every cyclist has their own unique strengths and Steve has found his is the ability to “sprint,” which just like in running, gives him the ability to exert a lot of power for a short amount of time. Due to this strength he has focused his efforts in two of the four racing genres. His favorite race is the road race. This type of racing is similar to the style you would see during the Tour de France where the cyclists travel a long distance (often up to 75 miles in his case) in large groups. This type of race is particularly appealing to Steve because it requires endurance, the ability to sprint and of course, strategy. He also thoroughly enjoys criterium racing, which is a crowd pleaser since it is on a short course with many laps and usually only lasts about 30 minutes to an hour. Criterium racing is the genre where Steve recently won second place and is looking forward to the Masters State Criterium on June 23rd.

Steve has recently been seen racing in Colorado and New Mexico and anticipates making his 8th appearance at Nationals this September in Bend, Oregon. Steve’s next event is the Elephant Rock Ride which he will do with his wife on a tandem bicycle, leaving us with this statement “One of the great things about a tandem is that you cross the finish line together.”

Swanson Rink Partners with ACE Mentor Program

Swanson Rink is proud to recognize three of our Mechanical Engineers as being a part of the ACE Mentor Program of Metropolitan Denver. ACE (Architecture, Construction, and Engineering) has been in Denver since 2004 and has worked with over 1,200 high school students in the area at no cost to the students. Swanson Rink’s Chelsey Lange, PE, has been involved with the organization for 3 years, and this past year recruited new staff members Sean MacKelvie and Rory Heim to the program.

These three members of our Mechanical staff have been volunteering their time for the past 14 weeks teaching the students about career opportunities in our industry and introducing them to a variety of hands-on, real world activities revolving around the Architecture, Construction and Engineering communities.

The main goal of these 14 week sessions is for the students to be able to plan and design mock projects based on real job sited throughout the Denver area. The students present their original ideas in front of their peers, teachers, families, and mentors.

Recently, Chelsey, Sean, Rory and Tim Chiddix, PE – Vice President, Mechanical – attended the annual “Blueprint to Success” event where 5 students were awarded scholarships based on their participation in the program, their presentations and an application process. Two students from Chelsey’s program were awarded with scholarships this year and Swanson Rink was honored to support both the students and our volunteers through a sponsorship at the Blueprint to Success event last week.

John Thomas Reelected to AGC Board

Congratulations to John Thomas, Director of Special Projects, for being reelected to the Board of Directors of the AGC of Colorado. John has been a member of AGC for 12 years, and has served on the Board of Directors for AGC for the past 8 years. The Mission for AGC of Colorado is to provide members with a competitive edge through excellence in advocacy, collaboration, leadership, networking, and services. In addition, he is also on the Board of Directors for the Specialty Contractors Council, and has held that post for the past 11 years.

Swanson Rink Awards Scholarship to Bannock Youth Center Participant

As you may recall, last summer Swanson Rink held a kickball tournament in order to raise money to establish a scholarship fund for the Bannock Youth Center. The Bannock Youth Center is an organization that is part of VOA Colorado and Swanson Rink has chosen to support this program for the last several years. The Swanson Rink Scholarship Committee worked closely with the case managers at Bannock to establish the guidelines for the Swanson Rink Superior Standards Scholarship, in order to best be able to serve the youth participating in their programs.

Swanson Rink is excited to announce that we have presented the first recipient, Cassandra (Cazi), with the award. Cazi is a student at CCD finishing her general studies in order to pursue Dental Hygienist School and requested a scholarship grant for a lap top to help her through school. Cazi has been working hard over the past 6 years to support herself and make her life better than the one she was given. The Swanson Rink Scholarship Committee sees Cazi not only as an excellent example of someone who has benefited from Bannock’s programs, but also a great role model for other youth experiencing some of life’s greater challenges. Cazi has learned what the true definition of family is from the Bannock Youth Center and she plans to continue to stay involved with Bannock and to help mentor other youth through the program.

Swanson Rink plans to continue to grow the scholarship fund so that more youth can achieve their educational goals. The second annual kickball tournament is scheduled for Saturday, June 7 at Cuernavaca Park in Denver. Please contact Amy Greenwood at [email protected] for more information.