Crane Dominators Help Regenerate Manchester City Centre

More than 800 Dominators from Crane Fluid Systems- a leading brand of Crane Building Services & Utilities- are being installed in the heating and cooling system of a massive new office development on Manchester's Picadilly Square. 

The order follows the success of 300 Dominators recently installed by Mechanical and electrical contractor, SES (www.ses-ltd.co.uk) in nearby Piccadilly Place, a mixed use development which includes a hotel, residential units, offices, retail space and car parking. 

The Dominator is a compact, prefabricated unit that combines a control valve, flow measurement device, bypass valve, strainer and drain, ready for simple and fast on-site connection to fan coils and other terminal units and is part of the Crane ProBalance range. 

SES is working with principal contractor OCON Construction on a complete refurbishment of the building currently known as Rail House which will be rebranded as Piccadilly Gate once work is completed. 

The building, adjacent to Piccadilly train station, is being stripped back to its concrete core and redeveloped to accommodate appproximately 12,000 sq m of office space. The building will achieve the BREEAM excellent environmental sustainability rating- and Crane Dominator systems will play a key role in providing a highly efficient system. 

All the components are supplied as one tested unit with a known performance, which minimises specification risks and saves valuable time. For design engineers, this means minimum design involvement is required. 

For contractors, installation of Crane Dominators provides a significant reduction in site labour and installation costs because connection is fast and simple. There is a range o standard Dominator units available and units can also be tailor-made to suit specific needs. 

At Piccadilly Gate, Dominators are encompassed within SES-designed pre-fabricated service modules which are being assembled and transported to site from SES's offsite facility in York (PRISM) and installed within the building structure. 

The Dominators are also shipped to multi-service chilled beam manufacturer Trox (www.troxuk.co.uk) which incorporates them into specially-designed chilled beam units. 

Phil Hull, project engineer for SES said: "The Dominator system helps to make the connection of units quick and easy. 

"We actually 'free issue' the Dominators to Trox and working with Crane has made this simple, with deliveries direct from Crane to Trox. 

"Crane has an excellent reputation for quality and worked well with us on another project on Piccadilly Square so we were confident about placing this substantial order with the company." 

In Piccadilly Gate, the accomodation is being laid out over ten floors, each of around 1,000 sq m and will be let on a floor by floor basis, either as fully open plan or with partial sub-division into cellular offices. The Dominators can be controlled individually by a central Building Management System (BMS), allowing the owner to be more flexible when configuring the space to meet the needs of the tenants.