549 Middle Neck Road, Great Neck

A new storage building on a 4,619 ft² lot on Middle Neck Road in Great Neck's business district: two storeys and a cellar of about 2,276 ft² each, a freight elevator, a stair, a pantry and a toilet, for a small staff (the occupant load is 15). A storage building has no process loads, but it still needs outdoor air on every level, safe temperatures, power and light, water and drainage, and fire protection — and because the cellar sits below the street sewer, waste has to be pumped up. The village's building department reviewed the project in detail and sent a long list of comments on structure, fire rating, energy and the mechanical, plumbing, electrical and fire-protection systems, so the MEP drawings had to answer each one on the sheets themselves. Everything was designed to the 2020 New York State codes.

Mechanical: heated outdoor air on every level — a fan with a 6 kW electric duct heater, a Class I motorized damper and a fire and smoke damper for the cellar (250 cfm), the first floor (250 cfm) and the second floor (300 cfm), 1.5 kW electric unit heaters, a 75 cfm toilet exhaust, and an 18,000 Btu/h air-cooled split cooling system with a roof condenser (16.9 SEER against 13.0 required). Intakes sit 10 ft from the lot line and from any exhaust, with a wire-mesh screen after each fan. Plumbing: a floor-mounted water closet, an undercounter lavatory, a pantry sink and a service sink on a 4 in. sanitary and 6 in. storm connection; a 33-gallon electric storage water heater (4 kW, 208 V, three-phase) with a circulation pump, expansion tank and electric heat trace on the hot-water piping; a reduced-pressure backflow preventer; a duplex sewage ejector in a 48 × 60 in. fibreglass basin and an elevator-pit sump pump, each with a high-level alarm; electronic trap primers; and the water supply checked against an assumed 100 gpm at 50 psi residual, with a booster if the hydrant test comes in lower. Electrical: power at 120/208 V three-phase through a 400 A main-breaker panel and a 125 A panel to lighting and power panels on each floor, disconnects for the freight elevator (60 A for the controller, 30 A for the cab lighting), emergency exit signs and battery-backed emergency lights. Sprinklers and fire alarm: sprinklers on the cellar, first-floor and second-floor plans to NFPA 13, with quick-response K-5.6 heads and supervised valves, and an addressable fire alarm system with pull stations, area and duct smoke detectors, an elevator-lobby smoke detector, a heat detector at the top of the elevator shaft, carbon monoxide detectors that shut down gas-fired equipment, synchronized strobes and central-station monitoring. We also prepared the COMcheck energy reports for the mechanical and plumbing systems and the sheet responses to the village's review.