Located 40 miles outside of Nashville, TriStar Horizon Medical Center is located in Dickson County and serves as the region’s largest, most comprehensive healthcare provider. TriStar Horizon offers emergency care, laboratory and diagnostic services, scheduled surgeries, labor and delivery services, recovery services, inpatient treatment, and other support services such as home nursing. While well-established in the community, the age and stage of the main hospital building required a critical operation of its own starting in 2020: gutting its HVAC central plan.

Partnering with Lee Company, TriStar Horizon requested a renovation of new chillers, pumps, piping, and other accessories to bring the HVAC systems up-to-speed and keep them operating at top capacity for years to come. During the two-year hospital renovation, several instances would prove to be anything but standard procedure. For example, the Lee Company team successfully shut down the medical center’s HVAC while still supplying air throughout the hospital, and another time keeping the operating room open while retrofitting an AHU-30 unit.

Square Footage:

2,000 square foot mechanical room

Duration: 24 months (May 2020 to May 2022)

Scope of Work:

  • Demolishing 2 existing HVAC chillers and replacing with 3 new chillers. This required shutting down the hospital’s central HVAC, freezing 4 chilled water lines in order to tie-in the new chillers to the existing hospital system, and cutting into the medical center’s roof to install structural steel supports for new cooling towers.
  • Installing 9 new chilled water pumps and associated piping
  • Installing 2 new fan coil units (FCUs)
  • Installing 2 new horizontal water-cooled packages (HWPs), along with a buffer tank and accessories
  • Installing a new makeup air unit (MAU-12) and modifying an existing AHU-12
  • Retrofitting an existing AHU-30, replacing the coil and the filter section. This required shutting down the unit and working around-the-clock
  • Installing all associated piping for the items above