Commissioning

The Alexander Dawson School Innovation Center represents a comprehensive approach to K-12 science education, featuring specialized learning environments designed to support the school’s innovative curriculum. The 24,000-square-foot, three-story building houses science classrooms and laboratories, as well as a shared makerspace with associated wood and metal shops and storage areas.

The Innovation Center serves as both an educational hub and campus welcome center, creating the first destination for visitors and prospective students. The facility incorporates four high school-level laboratories, three middle school-level laboratories, one K-5-level laboratory, computer labs, and specialized workshop spaces. The building design emphasizes visual connections to the outdoors and campus features while putting internal activities on display through intentional transparency.

The facility achieved LEED Gold certification, reflecting the project’s commitment to sustainable design principles. The building functions are integrated into the campus landscape, creating a cohesive educational environment that aligns facilities with the school’s divisions and departments.

As the project’s mechanical and electrical engineer, RMH provided mechanical and electrical design services, including AV/IT/security systems, and bid and construction-phase services. The design emphasized low energy use by evaluating multiple HVAC system options to optimize performance and efficiency for specialized laboratory and educational spaces.

Wells Concrete’s new Brighton facility consolidates two existing Denver locations into a single, comprehensive manufacturing operation to enhance production capability and flexibility for the Denver market. The 122,673-square-foot precast facility sits on 64.5 acres and features year-round indoor production capabilities for architectural precast and outdoor structural forms, with lifting capacity upgraded from 15-ton to 25-ton cranes to accommodate larger products and higher volumes.

The manufacturing facility incorporates long-line prestressing forms and an expanded inventory of movable forms to meet diverse project demands. The versatile production facility enables identical product manufacturing with consistent quality while maintaining flexibility to meet demanding schedules and minimize project risk. The specialized facility includes a 4,500-square-foot mold shop, steel shop, lunchroom, office, maintenance bays, boiler and air-compressor room, production area, beam bed/storage area, tool room, QC lab, chemical storage area, and washroom.

As the project’s mechanical and electrical engineer, RMH provided mechanical and electrical design and construction-phase services for the new concrete pre-stress plant. Services included chilled water, steam, compressed air, power, and natural gas systems to support the specialized manufacturing operations.

Home to 11 federal agencies, the Byron G. Rogers Federal Office Building in downtown Denver was targeted by its owner, the U.S. General Services Administration, for an extensive modernization project to significantly improve energy efficiency and deliver advanced updates to this important example of 1960s-era Federal architecture. This design-build project involved comprehensive upgrades to all major building systems housed within the 18-story, 494,000-square-foot office tower and minor improvements to the adjacent courthouse. The upgrades are projected to reduce energy use in the office tower by nearly 70 percent relative to current levels.

In addition to improving building envelope insulation, the most significant energy savings were achieved by implementing a chilled-beam system to replace the building’s inefficient, inflexible mechanical system. A chilled-beam system is an advanced method for distributing heating and cooling throughout the building with minimal energy waste. It primarily uses water at a moderate temperature to condition building spaces. After capturing heat generated by building occupants, computers, lighting, and solar gain, a thermal tank in the basement stores and circulates this heat through the building’s chilled-beam system as needed.

The retrofitted building features additional energy-saving technologies, including 100% LED lighting, enhanced daylighting, and roof-mounted solar thermal collectors that provide all of the building’s domestic hot water. Water-conserving strategies are expected to reduce water use by 40 percent. The comprehensive modernization positions this Federal facility as a model for sustainable government building operations while preserving its architectural significance.

As the project’s mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineer, RMH provided comprehensive MEP engineering services for this transformative modernization project.

BYU-Idaho is Idaho’s largest private University, sitting on a 430-acre campus with a district heating loop providing space heating for 40 buildings. RMH served as mechanical, electrical, and controls engineer for this project to add cogeneration capabilities to the Rexburg campus heating plant. The University replaced its coal-fired boiler plant with a new, multi-leveled heating plant containing a combined heat and power (CHP) system using natural gas. The project began with a conceptual study/economic analysis, which investigated the economic viability of adding cogeneration capabilities.

After completing the conceptual study and economic analysis, RMH designed the installation of a nominal 5.7MWe natural gas turbine with a 50,000 pph HRSG, which has a calculated simple payback of eight years. RMH’s design for the gas turbine featured a fully enclosed evaporative cooling system to increase the turbine output, as well as a turbine enclosure heat reuse system.

RMH provided comprehensive electrical, mechanical, and plumbing engineering services for a new 43,000-square-foot, two-story facility supporting global scientific field missions. The building, more than twice the size of its 1970s predecessor, includes offices, electronic and wet laboratories, an ITAR-controlled warehouse, and connects to two existing aircraft hangars.

Both hangars support NCAR’s Gulfstream V and C-130 research aircraft. RMH’s electrical design scope included:

  • Upgrading Hangar A’s electrical service from 120/208V to 277/480V
  • Power and lighting design for a new locker room in Hangar B
  • Integrated lighting and controls design throughout the facility

This facility enhances NCAR’s ability to support airborne research and innovation worldwide.

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