Plant-Wide HVAC Maintenance and Replacements

The JBS beef plant in Grand Island runs around the clock, and its HVAC equipment runs with it. Rooftop units cool offices and electrical rooms. Make-up air units replace the air pulled out of the kill floor, fabrication floor, hide room and rendering. Since 2018, Rasmussen Mechanical Services has handled more than 100 HVAC jobs at the plant out of our Gibbon office.

Seasonal maintenance. Every spring our crew services the rooftop units department by department. In 2026 that meant 72 hours on the roof with a boom lift and a hot-water pressure washer, cleaning coils that a meat plant loads up fast. Filters and belts are changed on schedule. Before winter, our team runs heat checks on the make-up air units so the production floors stay above freezing.

Catching problems early. Maintenance visits are where most repairs get found. On one box shop unit, our technicians cleaned the coil and replaced:

• Both expansion valves

• The condenser fan motor and contactors

• The liquid line driers

They then recharged the system. When the evaporator coil on the same unit later failed, we replaced it before the room lost cooling.

Make-up air. Our crew replaced the make-up air unit serving the hide room and installed a new one for the wastewater building. We’ve also replaced blower wheels and louver actuators, repaired modulation on the kill floor units, and put in new exhaust fans in rendering.

Rooftop unit replacements. In 2020 we replaced seven rooftop units in one project. Since then, our crew has put in new Trane rooftop units for:

• The safety office, USDA grading office and HR department

• The DC switchgear rooms

Each one was set by crane and tied into the plant’s electrical, gas, condensate and controls.

Cooling that protects production. The plant’s motor control centers and switchgear rooms have to stay cool or the line goes down. Our technicians have replaced AC equipment in several of those rooms. They also maintain the PTAC units in guard shacks and offices, and in 2026 we trained JBS maintenance staff on servicing them.

The same Gibbon team handles the plant’s boilers. Read about the dual watertube boiler installation at JBS Grand Island. Shoutout to our Grand Island HVAC Maintenance, Grand Island Rooftop AC Repair and Grand Island HVAC Replacement teams for keeping JBS running!