Commercial HVAC in Bangladesh — cooling and the power behind it, from one contractor.

It depends on the load and how the building is used. Below roughly 120 TR with zones that run at different times — offices, showrooms, hotels — VRF is usually right, because you only pay to cool the zones in use. Above roughly 150 TR of steady continuous load, such as an RMG production floor, a water-cooled screw chiller wins decisively on running cost: around 0.58 kW/TR against about 0.95 kW/TR for air-cooled. Between those, a ducted package or air-cooled scroll chiller is often simplest. The answer should come from a measured load audit, not a brochure.

Mixed-use towers with floor-by-floor tenancy usually favour VRF (8–96 HP, ESEER 7.1+), because each tenant controls their own space and empty floors cost almost nothing to leave idle. Single-owner buildings with a central plant room and a steady whole-building load usually favour chillers on lifetime cost. Pipe-run limits also matter on tall buildings. We model both against your floor plans before recommending either.

Above roughly 150 TR of continuous load, water-cooled screw wins on running cost — about 0.58 kW/TR against about 0.95 for air-cooled scroll — and on a six-day-a-week plant that gap is worth lakhs a year. Below 120 TR, or where water treatment is impractical, there is no roof space for a tower or no reliable make-up water, air-cooled is simpler and cheaper to maintain. The load audit decides it with your numbers, not ours.

The machine is rarely more than half of it. Cost is driven by measured TR load, system type, ducting and piping runs, electrical infrastructure including transformer and generator capacity, controls, and the civil work for plant rooms and cooling towers. Most commercial HVAC budgets here fail because the electrical upgrade and the plant room were priced separately, or not at all. We publish indicative ৳ bands above and quote firmly in taka after a free load audit, with the electrical and civil scope shown as line items rather than discovered later.

Yes — it is our largest Bangladesh sector. An RMG floor is a different brief from an office: high sensible heat from machinery and lighting, lint in the air stream, wide open spans, long shift hours and buyer compliance audits. That usually means chilled water or evaporative cooling combined with engineered ventilation and heat extraction, plus dehumidification where humidity affects the process. We completed a 400 TR chiller retrofit for a Gazipur RMG plant, and the full turnkey MEP installation for American & Efird at the KEPZ export zone in Chittagong.

Usually ventilation rather than cooling. Hot air with nowhere to go, lint loading the coils, and unaccounted moisture will defeat a correctly sized plant. Extracting heat at source with engineered make-up air often delivers more felt relief per taka than any chiller and costs a fraction to run. We will tell you this at the load audit even though it sells less equipment — buying more chiller to fix a ventilation problem is the most expensive possible answer.

Both, and that is the point. NativeWay (Bangladesh) Limited designs the system, supplies the equipment, installs it, commissions it and maintains it under AMC — and engineers the electrical, fire and plumbing services in the same scope. That is unusual in the Bangladesh HVAC market, where cooling and power are normally bought from separate contractors who blame each other when the plant will not start.

Yes. The Bangladesh National Building Code governs plant-room ventilation, refrigerant handling and safety, electrical protection, fire separation and smoke management. Every NativeWay HVAC design in Bangladesh is produced BNBC-compliant and documented for the building approval file. For export factories we also design to the buyer and RSC compliance requirements your audits are measured against.

Yes. We survey the existing plant, report honestly on its condition and remaining life, and quote an AMC against it. Taking over someone else's installation is common — most of the failures we are called to are maintenance failures rather than equipment failures, and a badly commissioned plant usually announces itself in the electricity bill long before it breaks down.

Typical equipment lead times are 2–4 weeks for VRF, 4–8 weeks for air-cooled scroll chillers and 8–12 weeks for water-cooled screw chillers, with installation and commissioning on top and partly in parallel. In practice the programme is set by the electrical infrastructure and the plant-room civil works rather than by the cooling equipment — which is why we survey those first.

Yes — most of the industrial work is outside Dhaka. We cover the Gazipur, Savar, Narayanganj and Ashulia industrial belts and down to Chittagong and the KEPZ export zone, operating from our Gulshan, Dhaka office.