240 Pacific Condos, San Francisco, CA

Category: High-Rise Residential

Square Footage: 70,286 sq ft

Services Provided: HVAC Engineering and Modeling

Completion Date: November, 2019

LEED Rating: Silver

Owner: Grosvenor Americas

Architect: Handel Architects

General Contractor: Swinerton Builders

Mechanical Contractor: Bay City Mechanical

Pragmatic PE started this project from Basis of Design and schematic drawing bridge documents provided by the owner. An immediate challenge on this project came to light when the kitchen hood was upgraded from a lower-end model to a high-capacity, luxury residential model. Pragmatic PE identified that the relatively air-tight construction of each individual room and the high-capacity kitchen vent hoods would pose a pressurization problem with the opening force of the entry door to each residence. We presented several options to the design team for resolving the pressurization issue and the final design resulted in changing the ventilation air system from constant-volume to variable air volume. This solution achieved pressurization control within each residence irrespective of the kitchen hood operation without substantially increasing the size of the rooftop ventilation air handling system. Bay City Mechanical appreciated the pro-active identification of the pressurization issue in addition to their opportunity to upsell the job.