Project Overview
The Harvey W. Wiley Federal Building — the FDA’s roughly 400,000-square-foot laboratory and office campus in College Park, Maryland — runs on a central heating and cooling plant original to the building. Decades in, that plant had reached the end of its useful service life, and the federal energy program covering the facility called for replacing it with high-efficiency equipment rather than continuing to nurse aging assets.
The modernization centers on three mechanical energy conservation measures: replacing the existing steam and hot water boilers with new natural gas-fired and high-efficiency hot water units, replacing the hot water to glycol heat exchangers, and replacing the centrifugal chillers with high-efficiency, variable-speed machines. Because complementary efficiency measures reduce building load, the new equipment can be right-sized — lowering both first cost and long-term operating cost.
The hard part is not the equipment. It is doing this inside a working federal laboratory building. New units are set on existing pads wherever possible, flue and plant access have to be reworked to rig equipment in and out, and cooling and heating capacity must stay online throughout — chillers are swapped one at a time, with each new machine started and commissioned before the next comes offline, and phasing follows the seasonal load so building services never lapse.
The work also carries the documentation load that federal energy projects demand: professional-engineer-stamped design through staged review intervals, controls integration into the building automation system, testing and balancing, pre- and post-installation measurement and verification trending in the required federal format, structured commissioning through pre-functional, functional, and integrated performance testing, and full O&M manuals and operator training at turnover.
It is the type of project Heffron is built for — high-efficiency central plant replacement in a mission-critical, continuously occupied federal facility, executed without interrupting the science happening upstairs.
Scope of Work
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
Project Details
U.S. Food and Drug Administration
Harvey W. Wiley Federal Building
College Park, Maryland
Government / Federal Laboratory
Central plant modernization — boilers, heat exchangers, chillers
Design-assist energy conservation work in an occupied federal facility
Have a similar project?
Heffron self-performs mechanical construction across the DMV — Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia — including inside active, validated production facilities.
