Park Royal Data Centre

At a live data centre in Park Royal, Alpha Controls carried out a cooling-tower fan replacement and BMS control upgrade for the rooftop cooling plant. The original arrangement — two large fans, each driven by its own inverter — was replaced with eighteen electronically commutated (EC) fans, nine on each cell of the cooling tower, giving finer speed control and built-in redundancy across the array.

Working in a business-critical environment, Alpha Controls removed the two existing inverters, installed a new BMS control panel, and ran power and control networks from the plant room at Level 1 up to the rooftop at Level 3 — cabling every fan individually and keeping power and data cleanly segregated from end to end.

Alpha Controls delivered the electrical and controls scope for the cooling-tower upgrade: removing the two redundant inverters, feeding new power supplies into two adaptable junction boxes, and installing a new BMS control panel. From there, a network backbone was run from Level 1 to the Level 3 roof to reach a pair of enclosures either side of the cooling tower, with power and data cabled out to all eighteen fans on top.

On the roof, power was distributed through a GRP distribution board on each side and the fan networks landed in a separate adaptable enclosure — power and network containment run on fully segregated trays. A network link was routed across the roof to tie the two sides together, bringing every fan back onto a single control network.

The upgraded cooling tower is controlled from a new panel in the plant room, driving eighteen EC fans across the two cells and networked back through the rooftop enclosures. The works comprised:

The heart of the job sits on the roof at Level 3. Where the tower previously relied on two large, inverter-driven fans, it now runs eighteen EC fans — nine on each cell — each with its own power feed and network drop. Splitting the duty across a bank of smaller fans gives the data centre finer control of cooling output and keeps the tower running if an individual fan is taken offline.

Every fan was cabled back to the enclosures on its side: power down from the GRP distribution board, and a network connection into the adaptable enclosure alongside it. With the containment kept separate for power and data, the rooftop installation stays clean, serviceable and easy to fault-find.

In a data centre, clean separation of power and control wiring matters — it keeps electrical noise off the network and makes the installation safe to work on live. Alpha Controls ran the fan power through GRP distribution boards and the fan networks through separate adaptable enclosures, on their own dedicated containment routes across the roof.

A single network link, run over the roof between the two sides, brings both banks of fans onto one control network back to the panel — so the whole tower is monitored and driven from a single point.