About Us

Building a smarter, connected future

Birdsall are a building services engineering company incorporating four business units that deliver a complete range of specialist services.

Our services support and enable our customers to effectively operate their buildings in compliance with best practice.

In addition, Birdsall specialises in helping our customers optimise their buildings performance, energy efficiency and sustainability by adopting new smart technologies.

Indeed, smarter, connected buildings are now a reality, delivering impressive benefits to all concerned. The technology is available and cost-efficient. Birdsall have developed solutions to serve many types of buildings and budgets.

Birdsall are an innovative company with a 46-year track record of delivering innovation, energy efficiency and environmental solutions. We are often ahead of our market in terms of new trends and technology adoption.

We have invested in the development of new services to meet the changing landscape and technology to deliver efficiency and environmental performance for a smarter building.

If you are ready to reassess your buildings' operation and maintenance strategy and wish to determine an exciting and achievable project for your building, please open a dialogue with us and together we can transform your building and the occupants' experience.

Throughout our 47 years in business, Birdsall have always been a family maintenance company.

However, innovation has always been in our DNA and has been our key differentiator to all the competition that has come and gone over those five decades.

Today the company remains a family-owned and managed business with Barry Birdsall its Chairman, Paul Birdsall its MD and Lynne Culliton its Service Director. They are supported by a fantastic team.

A Brief History:

1970's

Birdsall Air Conditioning was formed in May 1975 by refrigeration engineer Barry Birdsall. Initially, the company provided air conditioning services, then expanded into providing design and new installations. Within five years the company had grown into a team of ten people.

1980's

Our first major innovation was the establishment of a market for CFC-free air conditioning as a genuine green alternative to conventional a/c using harmful CFC’s as their refrigerant. We utilised an American product called Arkla-Servel and became the UK distributor. It was a struggle at first but in time became a great success.

We established the gas air conditioning market as an alternative to electric powered air conditioning. In Milton Keynes we set up the UK’s first Gas Air Conditioning Centre in partnership with British Gas to provide training and product demonstrations.

1990's

Our next big innovation was to play a key part in establishing the CHP-Absorption market, today known as tri-generation (Combined Heat & Power & Cooling). This concept enabled customers to significantly reduce their carbon footprint as well as reduce their energy and operating costs.

In 1995 we played a leading role at the BBC Television Centre in designing, installing and maintaining what was then the largest CHPC system in the UK. The system provided 6MW of power, 2MW of cooling. Our particular speciality was the absorption cooling.

We also found time in the 90’s to establish our own heating team which completed our HVAC credentials.

2000's

Many of our customers required more than just HVAC services which led us to establish our mechanical and electrical services credentials which became known as our Building Services team.

Our next innovation was to establish a proactive maintenance model as a more advanced and intelligent design to the standard reactive and planned maintenance model. It was a success with many large clients such as the British Film Institute and Southampton Solent University investing in it.

This period saw significant growth in the companies sales and personnel.

2010's

Following the 2008 recession, this decade was very much about efficiency and cost-cutting, a trend that became the norm.

To address this situation Birdsall researched all the actual owning costs of a building and devised a strategy to help customers improve efficiency and reduce owning costs both in the short term and in the long term. We invested in performance and monitoring technology to enable us to develop our Building Optimisation Maintenance Model.

In 2017 Birdsall launched its Energy Services team, serving a niche but growing market in District Energy Networks. Our optimisation model had proven an instant success in this market where efficiencies were key to a successful energy centre operation. Within this first year, we were operating and maintaining 15 energy centres.

In 2018 Birdsall launched its Living Services team, serving many of the residential towers whose energy and heating were supplied by the District Energy Networks we were now operating.

In 2019 Birdsall formally launched its R&D Programme named ‘Smarter Buildings’ with a healthy budget.

2020's

Looking ahead now, we plan to be at the forefront of innovation to deliver smarter buildings utilising technology, analytics and data management.