Universities & Colleges
Refrigeration, air conditioning, mechanical and electrical maintenance for university and college estates across London and Essex — catering, laboratories, lecture theatres and plant rooms, from one contractor.
Four decades on London campuses
University work goes back a long way here. One of our directors, Dave Hawkes, was responsible for maintaining Queen Mary College at Mile End when he was still on the tools in the 1980s, and the relationship with Queen Mary University of London has outlasted most of the equipment he worked on.
A campus is not one building with one system in it. It is catering, science, IT, teaching space and accommodation on the same estate, each with different plant, different consequences when it fails and different windows in which you are allowed near it. Estates teams tend to end up with a contractor for each — which is fine until the fault sits on the boundary between two of them.
What a campus estate actually runs on
The equipment we install, service and repair across university and college sites.
Catering, refectories and union bars
Walk-in cold rooms and freezers, servery and display counters, under-counter units, bottle coolers and ice machines — across a dozen outlets that all get busy in the same twenty minutes between lectures.
Laboratory and sample cold storage
Lab fridges, low-temperature and ultra-low freezers, and controlled environment rooms. A freezer holding somebody's doctorate is not a piece of catering equipment, and it does not get treated like one.
Server and comms room cooling
Close control units keeping IT rooms alive, where the cooling is a single point of failure for the whole institution's teaching systems and nobody notices it until it stops.
Lecture theatres, libraries and offices
VRF, fan coils and air handling units. Full rooms, a lot of glass and a lot of body heat — comfort cooling on a campus is a bigger duty than the floor area suggests.
Plant rooms and chilled water
Chillers, pumps, pressurisation, buffer vessels and the pipework feeding coils across a site. Covered in more detail on our chilled water page.
Halls of residence
Communal kitchen equipment and the plant serving accommodation blocks, where a fault at nine on a Sunday evening is still somebody's home.
How we work on a campus
The practical differences between maintaining a university estate and maintaining a commercial building.
The academic year decides the programme
Anything disruptive is planned into vacations, and nothing goes near an exam hall in May. Plant replacements get scoped for the summer months and booked well ahead, because there is no second window.
One contractor across the trades
Refrigeration, air conditioning, ventilation, mechanical and NICEIC approved electrical work in-house, so an estates team raises one job rather than three and nobody is waiting on somebody else's contractor.
Compliance you can hand to an auditor
F-Gas leak checking and record keeping across an estate of hundreds of systems, kept per unit and per site. REFCOM Elite registered, with individually certified engineers.
Site rules, taken seriously
Inductions, permits to work, out-of-hours access and working safely around students and staff. On a campus the people around the job are not site operatives, and the method statement should say so.
Universities we work with
University of East London
UEL has been teaching in east London since 1898, and now runs five schools across its Docklands and Stratford campuses — among them Health, Sport and Bioscience, which brings laboratory cold storage into the picture alongside the catering, teaching space and accommodation you would expect on any campus.
We look after equipment for the university, and it is the kind of estate this business is built for: several buildings, several kinds of plant, and an academic calendar that decides when you can touch any of it.
Queen Mary University of London
Our longest-standing campus relationship, going back to the Mile End site in the 1980s, when it was still Queen Mary College and one of our current directors was the engineer looking after it.
Four decades is long enough to have replaced plant we originally installed, and long enough to know a building's quirks without being told them each visit.
Planned maintenance and contracts
Most campus work is contract work: a schedule of assets, an agreed visit frequency, and the statutory checks folded into the same visits rather than billed separately. You get the records in a form your compliance team can actually file.
Where a system is beyond economic repair we will say so, and quote for replacing it properly in the next vacation rather than nursing it through another year of call-outs.
Related pages: chilled water, F-Gas compliance and mechanical services.
Breakdowns, including the ones that matter at 3am
Not every campus fault is urgent. A warm office in November can wait; an ultra-low freezer losing temperature cannot, and neither can the cooling on a comms room.
Tell us what has failed and what depends on it, and we will tell you honestly whether it needs an engineer tonight or first thing. Where samples or stock are at risk, protecting them comes before the repair.
Talk to us about your estate
Whether it is one failing system or a whole maintenance contract coming up for tender, tell us what you have got and we will survey it.