Retail & Commercial
Torrance Airport Atrium Building Energy Upgrades & Controls Integration
Controls, HVAC, and VAV upgrade for a hallmark airport-adjacent office.
Client
Airport Atrium, LLC - Building Owner
Location
Torrance, CA
Service Line
Walk into the Airport Atrium and the first thing you notice is the atrium — four stories of glass, a feature fountain, the kind of lobby that tells a tenant they’ve arrived. What you don’t see is what was running the place. When new owners took over this 97,000-square-foot Class A office building in Torrance in 2015, the HVAC was still on pneumatic controls — air tubes and dampers, decades-old technology behind a building that looked anything but.
They brought us in to find out what they actually had. We ran on-site surveys of the existing HVAC equipment, built the as-builts the building had been missing, and designed a set of energy measures to bring the systems up to modern efficiency.
Then our building automation and energy management group did the heart of the work: designed and installed a new direct digital control system to replace the pneumatics entirely. We built it on the Schneider Electric EcoStruxure platform, which let us fully integrate a power management module our own team designed. The result brought the building current — a new BAS, power metering, CO2 demand-control ventilation, and VAV box control, all talking to each other instead of guessing.
On the mechanical side, our construction division installed new HVAC units, a new boiler system with high-efficiency staged equipment, and variable frequency drives — new gear to match the new brain. We also handled the part most contractors leave to someone else: Athena facilitated the utility evaluation and rebate process with both Southern California Edison and Southern California Gas, putting money back against the project cost and significant savings against the building’s ongoing bills.
The pneumatics are long gone. The relationship isn’t.”
That was 2015. They still call us. When something on the system needs attention, the owner reaches the same firm that designed it, built it, and knows every controller in it — on call, when they need us. The pneumatics are long gone. The relationship isn’t.
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