A chiller in a Birmingham building was usually set before the walls closed around it. Getting the old one out and the new one in means a route through a mechanical room, a basement, or a roof — and often a crane on a city street. We plan and rig HVAC equipment across the Birmingham metro, from the first opening to the last anchor bolt.
Quick answer: Badass Logistics provides chiller, boiler & HVAC rigging in Birmingham, AL and the surrounding metro. We rig chillers, boilers, cooling towers, air handlers, and rooftop units into and out of mechanical rooms, basements, penthouses, and roofs — sectioned where the opening demands it and set ready for the mechanical contractor. Our crews work across Birmingham and nearby Alabama metros, and moves between facilities run as project freight under the same plan — usually quoted the same day. Call (307) 284-1332.
The machine is rarely the hard part of an HVAC replacement. The route is. A centrifugal chiller headed for a basement plant room, a boiler that only fits through a wall, a cooling tower that has to go up past occupied floors — the plan is set by doors, corridors, slab capacity, and crane reach long before it is set by the unit. In Birmingham, much of that work is in buildings that cannot shut down while it happens.
Badass Logistics walks both routes — the old unit's way out and the new unit's way in — and rigs them as one job. Refrigerant recovery, electrical disconnects, and piping stay with your licensed mechanical contractor; we sequence around them. Units are skated, jacked, or sectioned at factory joints where the builder allows it, and roof work runs as a planned crane lift. How to move a boiler or chiller →
Large HVAC plant in Birmingham is concentrated in campuses that run around the clock. The metro's hospitals — UAB Hospital, Children's of Alabama, and Ascension St. Vincent's Birmingham — replace chillers and boilers without ever closing a wing. University of Alabama at Birmingham and Southern Research run central plants of their own, often in basements reached by one freight elevator or a single knockout wall.
Birmingham, AL runs on steel & manufacturing, and almost none of it stays put. Same crews and the same chiller and HVAC rigging standards across the region:
The UAB medical and university campus, downtown bank towers, the BJCC complex and Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International carry the large central plant. The equipment we rig for them includes:
On the industrial side, Birmingham's plants are a legacy of large single-storey steel mill and foundry buildings with heavy crane bays alongside older multi-storey industrial buildings in the Ensley and Fairfield districts, and process cooling there means chillers, towers, and air handlers set on mezzanines and roofs. That work concentrates in the US Steel Fairfield Works steel complex, the historic Ensley industrial district, the CSX Boyles Yard rail corridor, and Port Birmingham on the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River.
Centrifugal, screw, and absorption chillers rigged out of and into plant rooms across the Birmingham metro.
Fire-tube and water-tube boilers removed and set, sectioned where the opening demands it across the Birmingham metro.
RTUs, cooling towers, and condensers lifted onto and off roofs across the Birmingham metro.
AHUs and fan sections moved through buildings and set on curbs and pads across the Birmingham metro.
Plenty of Birmingham jobs start and finish on one floor. The rest have to travel — to a new building across the metro, a sister plant down I-65, I-20, I-10 and I-59, or a facility in another state. We don't hand that part off. It runs as project freight inside the same plan: machines crated or prepped on site, loads sequenced to the rig-out, transport through our licensed broker and carrier partners with dedicated capacity for bigger moves, and our crew waiting at the destination to set it.
Data centers are the other big buyer of cooling plant in Birmingham. DC BLOX Birmingham (BHM-1) runs chillers, CRAH units, and condensers that are replaced and added on the facility's schedule, not the weather's.
Every chiller, boiler & HVAC rigging job in Birmingham, AL is quoted from the actual work, not a rate sheet. These are the things that move the number — send them with your request and you'll get a real quote back fast:
Photos of the equipment, its nameplate, and the path out of the building save a site visit on smaller Birmingham jobs. For bigger moves we walk both sites before we price anything.
The same Birmingham crews handle every kind of industrial rigging. If your job looks more like one of these, start here:
Running a trucking fleet out of Birmingham? See truck dispatch for fleets of 4+ trucks.
Working throughout Birmingham, AL and the surrounding metro — backed by a nationwide network of 88 locations when a move crosses state lines.
Chiller, Boiler & HVAC Rigging throughout Birmingham and the industrial suburbs around it — the towns below are where the plants, shops and distribution parks actually sit:
| Town | County | From downtown |
|---|---|---|
| Hoover | Jefferson County | 8 mi |
| Bessemer | Jefferson County | 12 mi |
| Tuscaloosa | Tuscaloosa County | 49 mi |
| Trussville | Jefferson County | 13 mi |
| Vestavia Hills | Jefferson County | 5 mi |
| Gardendale | Jefferson County | 10 mi |
| Pelham | Shelby County | 16 mi |
| Alabaster | Shelby County | 19 mi |
| Leeds | Jefferson County | 15 mi |
| Pell City | St. Clair County | 30 mi |
| Homewood | Jefferson County | 3 mi |
| Northport | Tuscaloosa County | 49 mi |
| Dixiana | Jefferson County | 18 mi |
| Mountain Brook | Jefferson County | 3 mi |
| Helena | Shelby County | 16 mi |
| Center Point | Jefferson County | 11 mi |
| Hueytown | Jefferson County | 12 mi |
| Talladega | Talladega County | 41 mi |
| Cullman | Cullman County | 45 mi |
| Jasper | Walker County | 35 mi |
| Calera | Shelby County | 29 mi |
| Sylacauga | Talladega County | 40 mi |
| Moody | St. Clair County | 19 mi |
| Irondale | Jefferson County | 6 mi |
Moving across the metro or out of state? See all our Birmingham services or get a quote.
Most Birmingham jobs don't stop at one service. The crew that rigs a machine out is the crew that manages the move and sets it back down — so you're dealing with one company from the disconnect to the re-level, not three subcontractors pointing at each other.
Machine has to come off the floor, through the door, or onto a pad before it travels? That's the rigging side of the same Birmingham crew.
Birmingham industrial rigging →Presses, compressors, generators, full production lines — disconnected, rigged, hauled, and re-leveled across Birmingham as one accountable job.
Birmingham machinery movers →Machine tools are instruments, not freight. VMCs, lathes, and grinders moved on air-ride and squared back to the builder's spec in Birmingham.
Birmingham CNC machine moving →Moving the whole floor instead of one machine? Phased teardown, sequenced loads, and reinstallation planning for Birmingham plants.
factory relocation in Birmingham →In Birmingham we also run riggers, machinery movers, CNC movers, and plant relocation, plus project freight for the jobs we rig — or see every service we offer in Birmingham.
The same Birmingham crew also handles millwright services, machinery removal, crane and rigging services, and machinery loading and unloading.
Specialty rigging in Birmingham: heavy lift rigging, transformer and generator rigging, MRI and medical equipment rigging, and lab equipment moving.
Tell us what's moving and where. We'll route the nearest crew and quote it fast.
Get a Birmingham Chiller Rigging Quote