Booking surveys for next week across Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Lancashire
Offices and workspaces
A floor plate with a glass south wall and a cold north corner needs zoning, not a bigger unit. We survey how the space is actually used through the working day, size against the real heat load, and fit in the evenings so nobody loses a desk.
CoolIn designs, installs and maintains office air conditioning across Manchester city centre and the wider North West, from a single meeting room to a multi floor VRF system. Most office work is done outside trading hours at standard labour rates, so the floor is usable the next morning.
What makes offices difficult
Nearly every office we are called back to was sized off a square metre rule of thumb. Four things break that rule, and all four are visible on a survey if anyone bothers to look.
A south or west facing elevation can take a room several degrees above the one behind it on the same floor, and the gap moves through the day. One system set to one temperature will always be cooling one half and overcooling the other. The fix is zoning at design stage, not a compromise setpoint later.
A person sitting at a desk gives off roughly the heat of a small light bulb, and a room of twelve in a glass box with the door shut climbs fast. Meeting rooms are the single most common complaint in an office, and they are almost always undersized because they were counted as floor area rather than as people.
Desktop machines, monitors, a printer, and the comms cupboard that runs a switch and a firewall every hour of the year. In a small office that stack can be a meaningful share of the total load, and the comms cupboard often needs its own dedicated cooling rather than a share of the open plan system.
Give a floor one controller and you get a thermostat war. We set zones that match how people actually sit, lock the range so nobody can drive it to 16 degrees, and hand over the controls to whoever runs the office rather than leaving a remote in a drawer.
The options
The ceiling decides most of this. What sits above the tiles, and whether there is a void at all, narrows the options before anything else does.
The default where there is a suspended ceiling. Sits flush in a tile grid, throws air four ways, and is the cheapest route to even coverage across open plan. Needs around 300mm of void.
The unit hides in the void and feeds linear grilles, so the ceiling stays clean. The usual choice on a designed fit out, or where a landlord or a listed frontage will not accept visible plant.
One outdoor unit serving many indoor ones, with heat recovery moving heat from the sunny side to the shaded side rather than dumping it outside. Worth the extra capital cost from roughly six indoor units upward.
Cheapest per room and the right answer for a small office, a single meeting room, or a period building with no ceiling void to work with.
Budget
Installed prices covering equipment, labour, commissioning and handover. Commercial jobs are priced per project because ceiling voids, riser routes and access all move the figure, so treat these as budget bands rather than quotations.
Guide prices, installed. Confirmed at site survey.
Up to about 30 square metres. Installed prices
Open plan plus meeting rooms. Installed prices
Whole building or phased fit out. Installed prices
These are guide bands, not quotations. An office quote from us shows the heat load calculation for each area with the working visible, an equipment schedule with positions and pipework routes, the electrical requirement, and a programme set around your working hours. The survey costs nothing and the written price does not move.
Compliance and tenancy
Two of these are law and catch more offices than people expect. The third is not law at all, and is the one that costs tenants money at the end of a lease.
Any building with air conditioning over 12kW of effective rated output needs an inspection by an accredited energy assessor at least every five years. That threshold is far lower than most office managers assume.
Four 3.5kW cassettes on one floor already cross it. So does a single small VRF. The duty sits with the building owner or whoever controls the system, not with the company that fitted it, and the report goes on the national register.
We flag systems that are over the threshold during servicing, so a renewal date never arrives as a surprise.
Systems are measured by the refrigerant they hold converted into tonnes of CO2 equivalent. Past 5 tonnes, the operator has to arrange leak checks and keep records. With R32 that line sits at roughly 7.4kg of refrigerant.
A handful of cassettes on separate condensers will usually sit under it. An office VRF almost always sits over it, and then the duty is annual at minimum. The full thresholds are set out on the commercial page.
Nobody opens a refrigerant circuit on your system without current F-Gas certification. That is a legal requirement for handling refrigerant, not a preference.
Most office leases require written consent before plant is fixed to the structure or a core is drilled through an external wall, and a serviced building will often have its own rules about condenser positions and roof access.
The part tenants miss is the other end. A lease that requires reinstatement means stripping the system out and making good when you leave, which is a cost worth pricing before you commit rather than discovering at exit.
We will put the equipment schedule and condenser positions in writing for a landlord application, which is normally what gets consent moving.
How it works
A free survey, a written price with the heat load working shown, and a programme set around your hours. The four stages are the same on every commercial job and are set out in full on the commercial page, along with servicing plans and what to do about breakdowns.
We fit office systems across Manchester city centre, Salford Quays, Spinningfields and the wider North West, including Manchester, Salford, Stockport, Warrington and Liverpool. See every town we cover.
Other business types
Each sector has its own page, because a server room and a hair salon are genuinely different jobs. The commercial overview covers what applies to all of them.
Questions
Yes, and most office work is done this way. We work evenings and weekends at standard labour rates rather than a premium, sheet and clear the area each night, and phase larger floors so only one part of the office is affected at a time. A single meeting room is usually one evening.
Cassettes drop into the existing grid, so the tiles come out and go back. Pipework runs in the void. The visible work is the core through the external wall for the pipe route and the condenser position outside, and those are the two things worth agreeing with your landlord before we start.
No. Open plan is normally covered by several units on shared control, while meeting rooms and any room with a different aspect get their own zone. The point of zoning is that the rooms that behave differently are controlled differently, not that every door gets its own box.
A modern inverter system uses around a quarter to a third of the electricity of an old fixed speed one for the same output, because it modulates rather than cycling on and off. As a rough figure, a 3.5kW cassette holding a meeting room on a warm afternoon draws roughly the power of a desktop computer and a monitor once it has pulled the room down.
If the installed air conditioning in the building is over 12kW of effective rated output, yes, at least every five years, with the first within five years of the system going into service. Four 3.5kW cassettes cross the line. The duty is the building owner's or the operator's, not the installer's.
A four cassette open plan floor is typically three to five days on site including commissioning. A VRF system across several floors is programmed floor by floor and quoted with a written programme, so you know which week affects which team.
Free survey
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