LOCATION
Fort Myers, Florida

AREA
200,000 GSF

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Located on the Shell Point Retirement Community campus, the Larsen Health Center includes a medical office center, behavioral health suite, rehabilitation therapy center, dental offices, pharmacy, and a 180-bed skilled nursing facility. The facility includes exam and procedure rooms, on-site imaging services, and offices for Shell Point’s medical staff and specialty physicians. A therapy center offers inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation services in a dynamic open-gym concept, along with an occupational therapy home suite, an aqua therapy pool, and private treatment rooms. A dental clinic, full-service pharmacy, chapel, meeting space, and café complete the first floor.

PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS

• Dedicated, separate HVAC systems were provided for the medical office building, the pharmacy, and the skilled nursing facility.
• High-efficient variable refrigerant systems were utilized to serve the MOB and SNF for building skin and internal loads. The variable refrigerant systems include multiple outdoor heat pump modules that serve multiple horizontal and vertical air handling units with refrigerant coils to heat and cool each zone. The system was designed with heat recovery to allow simultaneous heating and cooling between zones while also providing the benefit of sharing energy between zones that are in different modes. A space in cooling has heat removed that is then shared to heat the space in heating, providing additional efficiency beyond the scheduled performance of the high-efficient system.
• Ventilation loads were handled by dedicated air-cooled outside air handling units with heat recovery wheels to reclaim energy from the building’s exhaust air streams. The majority of the building exhaust and relief air streams are run through enthalpy energy recovery wheels to precondition the incoming outside air. This reduced equipment size and energy usage year-round.
• The lighting system utilized luminaires with high color rendering index and glare reduction to achieve horizontal and vertical illuminance that would accommodate the needs of the occupants and visual tasks to be performed. The lighting controls included daylighting to assist with visual glare during daytime hours as well as time clock scheduling to accommodate circadian rhythms.
• Power distribution system for the SNF portion of the building includes two generators with buried diesel tanks. Generators are located exterior of the building with a platform to raise them above the 100-year flood water level. Main and emergency electrical rooms are located on the second floor to be above the 100-year flood water level, making the facility operable in a storm situation. The MOB was fed from a separate power distribution system with a natural gas generator located on the first floor.
• Resident unit rooms are equipped with private mode fire alarm occupancy notification to omit notification devices from resident units and only alert trained nursing staff in the event of a fire.
• Smoke zones isolate the spread of smoke in the event of a fire from each stairway, elevator bank, and the east/west side of each resident floor.

Photography credit: Cheryl Stieffel

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