Historic England: Fort Cumberland
Maintaining Historic England's archaeological archives
| clients brief: | Maintaining Historic England's archaeological archives at different conditions in different areas of the building |
| architect: | Historic England |
| contractor: | Hampshire Plumbing Services |
| equipment: | Munters desiccant dehumidifiers twin Cellarking systems matched to Marstair condensing units, operated by bespoke control panels |
Fort Cumberland is a pentagonal artillery fortification erected to guard the entrance to Langstone Harbour, east of Portsmouth dockyard. It is widely recognised as the finest example of a bastion trace fort in England and houses the Royal Navy archives.
It is now used by Historic England for their archaeological archives where they needed to maintain 10°C, 40% RH in one area and 15°C, 50% RH in another.
For the lower humidity application, we couldn't rely on just the refrigeration system to control the rooms so we used wall mounted Munters desiccant dehumidifiers in conjunction with twin Cellarking systems matched to Marstair condensing units and operated by individual control panels.
The system was installed by Portsmouth based Hampshire Plumbing Services.
image credit: Shawn M. Kent [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons
