The challenge
Major building-systems upgrades don't wait for convenient weather. When the facility needed to take its permanent heating system offline for a construction project right as winter was closing in, the stakes were higher than occupant comfort alone. The research operations housed inside the building couldn't afford a gap in reliable heat.
There was no room for a partial fix. The building needed a temporary hydronic source that could match its full heating load, get installed fast, run unattended through the winter, and talk to the existing building automation and alarm systems as if it had always been there.
The numbers were significant: roughly 10.5 million BTU at 1,050 GPM. Whatever went in had to cover that load with real margin, not just meet it on paper, because a temporary system with no redundancy is a bet nobody wants to lose in the middle of winter. And with the deadline set for December, there wasn't time for the usual permanent-installation lead times.
The solution
We designed and built a custom mobile hydronic boiler room from the ground up, sized specifically to the facility's load and packaged entirely inside a gooseneck trailer enclosure, delivered and connected on site, and ready to be redeployed elsewhere when the job wraps.
- Three 4 MMBtu Raypak Xverse boilers. 12 MMBtu combined against the facility's 10.5 MMBtu load, sized with real margin.
- 1,050 GPM house pump on an ABB variable frequency drive, sized precisely to the building's hydronic flow requirement.
- Continuous CO monitoring for combustion safety, plus enclosure space heating to protect the equipment through winter conditions.
- Programmable Logic Controller handling BAS integration and alarm reporting, with a Red Lion touchscreen at the equipment enclosure for on-site status.
- Full gooseneck trailer packaging for mobility, so the whole system stays reusable after this project ends.
Controls built to feel permanent
The Red Lion touchscreen at the enclosure gave on-site staff real-time visibility into boiler status, alarms, and system parameters. That data also fed directly back into the building's BAS, so facility staff could monitor the temporary system exactly the way they'd monitor permanent equipment, without needing to stand at the trailer to check on it. Make-up water and expansion tank piping inside the enclosure kept the system self-sufficient.
Timeline
- Design & build: completed in 1.5 months.
- Delivery: on site and operational by the December 2025 deadline.
- Operation: ran continuously from December 2025 through June 2026, the full winter heating season and into summer, covering the entire construction window.
The outcome
The mobile boiler room ran without interruption for the entire construction period. The building held proper temperature throughout, and the research operations inside continued without a single heating-related disruption while the permanent systems were upgraded.
Because the whole system lives inside a mobile, trailer-mounted enclosure instead of a fixed installation, it didn't get decommissioned when the job wrapped. It's a reusable asset now, ready to be relocated to cover the next facility's temporary heating need.
- Zero heat loss through a full winter construction period.
- Delivered on schedule, inside a 1.5-month design-and-build window.
- Boiler capacity sized with real margin above the 10.5 MMBtu / 1,050 GPM load.
- Full BAS integration gave facility staff the same visibility and alarming as a permanent system.
- Reusable mobile asset available for future projects.