Laboratory & Life Sciences
Los Angeles County Coroners Coroner-Medical Examiner Building
Double-duct to VAV retrofit and new BAS — kept the building running throughout.
Client
Los Angeles County Coroner
Location
Los Angeles, CA
Service Line
A double-duct pneumatic-to-DDC conversion with full pressurization control at LA County’s coroner facility — installed after hours, in a building that never stopped working.
Client: County of Los Angeles, Department of Public Works
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Year: 2013 and 2021
Service Line: Building Automation — Design-Bid-Build & Service
In a coroner’s facility, airflow direction isn’t comfort. It’s a safety function.
Athena won the building automation for the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner on a design-bid-build basis with LA County Public Works, then stayed on to service and maintain it. We installed the original Schneider/TAC system and, years later, modernized it to EcoStruxure Building Operation — the same return-and-renew pattern we’ve built with public clients across Southern California.
The building runs on a double-duct system. It’s an older design that carries two separate air streams to every zone, one hot and one cold, and blends them at a mixing box to hit each room’s temperature. It works, but it carries a built-in penalty: the system is often heating and cooling the same air at once, and the hot and cold decks get set to satisfy the hardest-to-condition rooms, so the whole building pays for a handful of zones.
The better move is to leave the distribution in place and replace the controls that run it.
Ripping that out is rarely worth it. Replacing a double-duct system means demolishing two full duct runs and every mixing box above the ceiling, which in a working facility is hugely expensive and disruptive. The better move is to leave the distribution in place and replace the controls that run it. We converted the pneumatics to DDC, adding new controllers, sensors, valves, and actuators to the existing mixing boxes and air handlers so the system modulates with real precision. The controls reset the hot- and cold-deck temperatures to match actual demand and trim the simultaneous heating and cooling that double-duct designs waste, all without touching the ductwork.
Precision matters most in the exam spaces. In a coroner’s facility, airflow direction is a safety function: exam and autopsy suites have to stay under controlled pressure so air moves the right way and contaminants and odors stay contained. The DDC holds those pressure relationships continuously, where the old pneumatic controls drifted out of calibration.
Because the ducts stay put, the work lives in the ceilings and mechanical rooms. We changed the controls box by box, ran new control wiring and network back to the front end over a LonWorks network with Ethernet/IP routing and a fiber-optic backbone, then calibrated and sequenced each mixing box and balanced the air. All of it ran after hours, zone by zone, so the medical examiner’s operation never stopped and spaces came back online one at a time.
Years later, when the platform aged, we were the ones who modernized it to EcoStruxure Building Operation. Having installed and maintained the system from the start, we knew exactly what we were upgrading.
The building itself has history. The Coroner’s offices occupy the original Administration Building of the Los Angeles County General Hospital, designed in 1909 by architects Hudson & Munsell in an Austrian/German Secessionist style. Threading a modern, open control system through a structure well over a century old is its own kind of work.
Client: County of Los Angeles, Department of Public Works (for the Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner). Delivery: Design-Bid-Build plus ongoing service. Controls platform: Schneider Electric TAC Vista, modernized to EcoStruxure Building Operation.
Related public-sector building automation: Riverside Juvenile Court.
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