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REFURBISHMENT project
RETAIL BUILDING SHAPED BY TIME, TECHNOLOGY AND REINVENTION
By Uriel Abrahams of VMG Consultants
Cape Town store HVAC upgrade corrects decades of design flaws.
All images supplied by Elmecair retail store in Ottery, Cape Town, tells a quietly remarkable
A story of how building services evolve over time, shaped by changing technology, shifting priorities and lessons learned the hard way. Beneath what appeared to be a conventional shopping environment lay over four decades of layered mechanical history – a site that had undergone three major HVAC eras, each considered‘ state of the art’ in its own time, yet the first two leaving behind unseen consequences.
When the building was first constructed in 1986, the air-conditioning system represented the then-pinnacle of supermarket design. A water-cooled chilled water installation served the store and indeed the entire shopping centre, including necessarily robust first-floor masonry plant rooms built as part of the base structure. These rooms housed the chillers, numerous chilled water and hot water pumps, large backward-curved centrifugal supply air fans, unusual V-shaped chilled water coils, complex pneumatic controls and even an early form of remote monitoring via telephone – an advanced concept long before digital building management systems became common.
The system was integrated with energy-saving ideas of the era, including‘ economy cycle’ systems, hot water reclaim via auxiliary shell and tube condensers on two of the four chillers, for cleaning and de-humidification purposes in the supermarket, and refrigeration spillage scavenging, which re-used cool air spilling from display fridges to help air-condition the store.
What made this first system exceptional was not just the equipment, but the architecture that supported it. The masonry plant rooms were solid, permanent spaces designed to last as long as the building itself. They were durable, fire-resistant and inherently suited to long-term service access – qualities that would later prove invaluable.
The second major transformation came in 2007. For reasons lost to time, the original water-cooled chilled water system was abandoned and replaced with air-cooled packaged units
RACA Journal I April 2026 imported from Europe. These units were installed on the concrete roof over the original supermarket plant rooms and supported on specially constructed piers. To facilitate this radical departure from the original system, relatively small holes were cut through the centres of the existing concrete coffers to maintain their structural stability, and much larger openings were created in the plant room brick walls, all necessary to route new supply and return air ducts down into the store.
This decision marked a turning point. While the packaged units were modern for their time, the installation introduced a fundamental design flaw – one that remained hidden for years. Severe duct restrictions beneath the roof slab starved the system
of both supply and return air. To compensate, the associated fresh air dampers were left permanently open, forcing the system to operate almost entirely on outside air. The consequence was dramatic: compressors struggled under extreme operating conditions, reliability suffered and energy consumption soared. Yet because the problem was buried below the roof and the store remained operational, the true cause went unnoticed.
By the time the site was reassessed nearly two decades later, the symptoms were evident. The packaged units had become unreliable, condenser coils were badly corroded by the coastal environment, and the remaining cooling towers from the original system had deteriorated into a safety risk. What was once cutting-edge had become a complete liability in both operating and repair costs.
“ The masonry plant rooms were solid, permanent spaces designed
to last as long as the building itself.”
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