Seremban Prima Mall: Chiller Plant & AHU Retrofit

About the project

Seremban Prima is a seven-storey shopping mall on Jalan Dato Bandar Tunggal in the centre of Seremban, with Parkson as its anchor and a cinema, retail and dining across roughly 320,000 square feet of lettable space. A mall that size cools a large, variable crowd from open to close. Cobler retrofitted the controls on its chiller plant and its air handling units.

The challenge

A mall's cooling load swings hard through the day: light in the morning, heavy through the afternoon and weekend peaks. The plant and the air handlers have to keep shoppers comfortable across all of it. In an older building, the chiller plant and the AHUs often run on dated or manual controls that hold a fixed output regardless of how full the mall is. That keeps the building cool, but it wastes energy whenever the load is below the assumed maximum, which is most of the time.

Retrofitting is harder than building new. The work has to go in around a mall that stays open, without disrupting trading hours or comfort.

The solution

Cobler retrofitted the building automation on the chiller plant and the AHUs, bringing both under coordinated control.

- The chiller plant was put on demand-based control, staging chillers and their pumps and cooling towers to the mall's actual cooling load instead of a fixed output, so the plant runs efficiently as the crowd rises and falls.
- The air handling units were brought under control to deliver cooling where and when the spaces need it, matching air-side output to occupancy rather than running every unit flat out.
- CobiNeural sits over the retrofitted plant for monitoring, so the team sees consumption, demand and plant efficiency in one place and can confirm the retrofit is doing its job.

The result

The mall keeps shoppers comfortable while its plant and air handlers run to demand instead of at full output all day. The retrofit went in around live trading, upgrading how the building is controlled without replacing it wholesale. For the operator, it is a lower cooling bill on the same building, delivered through controls rather than a rebuild.

See how the same approach plays out on other sites in our case studies, or talk to us about chiller plant and AHU retrofits for your building.