After touring 40 southwest car dealer service buildings prior to constructing the $9 million facility, President, Don Luke, knew exactly what he didn’t want. “After just a short visit to some service departments we either had a headache or our clothes smelled like car exhaust,” recalled Luke, who heads the 76-year-old, 18-acre dealership that ranks as the nation’s 45th largest in sales.

Luke’s solution isn’t earth shattering, but it has escaped many engineers and dealerships in the past. “You’ve got to pump in a lot of clean air and then suck it out,” said Luke.

Implementing Luke’s solution took some innovative design from the engineering department of Tri-City Mechanical, a Chandler, AZ.-based mechanical contractor and one of 12 founding members of publicly-traded Comfort Systems USA.

The superior air quality may be subliminal, but what stands out is the absence of tailpipe exhaust hoses and metal ductwork littering the ceiling. In quest of a clean, neat, and high-tech appearance, the Tri-City Mechanical engineering team used lightweight, cost-saving and aesthetic fabric ductwork by DuctSox, Dubuque, IA.

Even though Tri-City Mechanical operates a sheet metal shop with spiral metal duct fabrication capabilities, the design/build contractor still specified fabric duct. Using fabric air dispersion, which requires smaller installing crews and less man-hours to install, saved the project over $15,000 in labor costs.

Since fabric duct is easily disassembled in minutes from its double-hung cable system, Luke plans to have the fabric duct laundered by in-house personnel annually to maintain the service center’s pristine air quality and appearance.

DuctSox’s Sedona on the lower level plus TufTex models on the second floor body shop and parts storage areas also aided Tri-City’s strategy of air comfort without drafts. The fabric duct’s linear diffusion, which consists of factory engineered orifices the entire length of duct, disperses air gently. Occupants don’t feel the air, only the temperature comfort, according to Mullins.

This system has proven superior to the standard ventilation design of many car dealership service departments. Our system disperses air throughout the workspace and draws it down to 12 inches off the floor where people work.

Adding to the air comfort is a network of eight carbon monoxide (CO) sensors that automatically switch one or all four banks of eight exhaust fans into a high-speed 7,560-cfm purge mode in the event CO levels surpass ASHRAE recommended levels resulting in a complete air change in 3.5 to 4.5 minutes. Controlled by an American Auto-Matrix, Export, Penn., only two purge incidences—both involving diesel engine start-ups—have occurred in the first six months of operation, according to Luke.

The project took 12 months to complete and is the first phase of a three-phase $22 million construction cycle that will produce additional showroom space and a detail shop.

According to Mullins, other dealers should take a note of the Bill Luke’s state-of-the-art facility because it might become the 21st Century standard for future auto service center HVAC.