Data center and mission critical cooling in Oklahoma

I am Dave Hartzell. Before I opened my shop in Kingfisher, I ran the mechanical side of a hardened national carrier switch building, the kind of building that is not allowed to go dark. That is where I learned what mission critical actually means, and it is the standard I bring to a server room, a computer room or a chilled water plant in Oklahoma today. Call 405-375-4822.

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What mission critical cooling means to me

Most HVAC work is judged on comfort. This work is judged on uptime. In a data hall, a switch room or an equipment room, the load runs every hour of every day, the heat never stops, and the room has no thermal mass to coast on. A unit that drops out at two in the morning does not give you until business hours.

So the job is different in three ways. Redundancy has to be real, which means the standby path gets tested, not assumed. The building has to be watched and trended, so you see the drift before it becomes an outage. And the maintenance has to be written down, because on a critical building somebody upstream is going to ask for the record.

Where that discipline came from

Sprint recruited me to run a roughly $34 million expansion of a hardened long distance switch building in Fort Worth, Texas, against a federal deadline. It finished ahead of the deadline, under budget, with zero FCC reportable outages. After that project Sprint made me the field engineer for their sites across the whole state of Texas, working the building controls and the mechanical systems site to site.

I am not going to dress that up as something my Kingfisher shop did. It is my own career, and the full story with the photographs is on my experience page. What it means for you is that carrier grade habits, redundancy testing, controls work, written procedure, are not a sales line to me. They are how I was trained to run a building.

The building I worked in is a commercial data center today. It was overbuilt for a converged data future twenty years before that future showed up.

Photographs from that work

These are my own job site photographs from the Sprint work in Texas, not stock images. Chiller plant, chilled water pumps and piping, raised floor, precision cooling units, controls.

What I work on

• Precision cooling units. Computer room and data room units, service, controls and changeouts.
• Chilled water systems. Chillers, pumps, piping, flow and the mechanical room around them.
• Raised floor and airflow. The floor is part of the air path, so it is part of the machine.
• Redundancy and standby. Making sure the backup path works when it is called on instead of on paper.
• Controls and monitoring. Building automation, trending and alarms, so drift gets caught early.
• Server rooms and equipment rooms. The small critical room inside an ordinary building, which is most of what Oklahoma actually has.
• Scheduled maintenance with a written record. Documented visits you can hand to a facility manager or an auditor.

Oklahoma is building these now

Data center projects and their power agreements are showing up in the counties I already drive every day, Kingfisher, Garfield and Blaine among them. Most buildings around here will never be a hyperscale campus. What they will have is a server room, a network closet or an equipment room that has quietly become the most expensive room in the building, still cooled by whatever was cheapest at the time.

That room is the one worth a look before it costs you a night. If you have one, call me and I will come see it.

What it costs

Where I cover

My daily service area is seven counties: Kingfisher, Canadian, Oklahoma, Garfield, Major, Logan and Blaine. Geothermal work takes me most of the way across the state. For commercial and facility work outside the seven, call and describe the project rather than assuming the answer is no.

The rest of my commercial work

• Commercial HVAC repair in Central Oklahoma, the main commercial page and where to start if your building is down.
• The Guthrie McDonald’s case study, a real commercial job start to finish.
• Commercial rooftop unit repair, the packaged units on top of most Oklahoma buildings.
• Restaurant HVAC, kitchens, make up air and the balance problems that come with them.
• Emergency commercial HVAC, when the building cannot wait for morning.
• Controlled environment and specialty HVAC, grow rooms, labs and other tight tolerance spaces.
• Cooling tower service, if your chilled water loop is fed by a tower.
• National accounts and facility vendors, if you dispatch trades into Oklahoma sites.
• Generator service, the other half of staying up when the power goes.

Frequently asked questions

Do you work on data center and server room cooling in Oklahoma?

Yes. I work on the mechanical side of mission critical rooms: server rooms, computer rooms, telecom equipment rooms, precision cooling units, chilled water, pumps and the controls that tie them together. My everyday service area is seven counties around Kingfisher. For larger facility work, call me and tell me what the building is and what it has to hold, and I will tell you straight whether I am the right trade for it.

How much does a commercial HVAC diagnostic cost in Oklahoma?

A commercial diagnostic is $389 flat, day or night, for light commercial up to 15 tons. There is no after hours uplift on that number. Larger systems get sized by me on site rather than picked off a menu. There is always a dispatch fee and always a diagnostic fee, and estimates on new equipment are free.

What makes mission critical cooling different from normal commercial HVAC?

The failure cost. On a store rooftop a failure is uncomfortable. In a data hall or a switch room, a failure takes the load down, and the equipment does not forgive a temperature swing while you drive back for a part. Mission critical work means redundancy that actually works when it is called on, monitoring that tells you before it fails, and a maintenance record you can hand to somebody.

Have you actually worked on a data center?

I spent years on carrier grade work before I opened my own shop. Sprint recruited me to run a roughly $34 million expansion of a hardened long distance switch building in Fort Worth, against a federal deadline. It came in under budget with zero FCC reportable outages, and afterward I was Sprint’s field engineer for their sites across Texas. The photos on this page are mine from that work. The building itself is a commercial data center today.

How fast can you get to a system that is down?

I answer the phone and I schedule real slots. For a building that cannot wait, say so when you call and I will tell you honestly what I can do that day rather than booking you and hoping. Call 405-375-4822.

What counties do you cover?

My daily service area is seven counties: Kingfisher, Canadian, Oklahoma, Garfield, Major, Logan and Blaine. Geothermal work takes me most of the way across Oklahoma, and for commercial and facility work outside the seven, call me to talk through the project.

Do you handle chilled water systems and cooling towers?

Yes, chilled water plants, pumps, piping and the controls. Cooling tower work has its own page. If your building runs a tower feeding a chilled water loop, start there or just call and describe the plant.

Can you work as a subcontractor for a national account or a facility manager?

Yes, that is a real part of my business. I take dispatched work from national chains and facility maintenance vendors, with the paperwork and site reporting those programs need.