There was a day and a time when education in engineering met the reality of boilers, refrigeration systems, piping, valves, and drawings. Some of the drawings were true blueprints dating back to the pre-nineteen hundreds; others were as crisp and pristine as the new drywall that surrounded me as I looked them over.
Time moves on however, repairs are made, systems change and the knowledge of what once was state-of-the-art is lost.
When I was a young boy, I used to watch an elderly man walk home along our gravel lane after he finished working on old trains a few blocks away. He, and the building he used to work in, are long gone now as is all the experience that becomes the memories of yesterdays. The fact is that most drawings I see do not come close to representing the facility I am standing in. You can’t trust them. So, you put on your CSI demeanor - walk through and, at times, crawl through tiny spaces to get to the heart of the matter. Two places come to mind.
There are times when I volunteer to help various churches reduce their energy consumption. With such limited tithing lately, a few thousand dollars saved per year is a welcome relief for them. Steam heating systems lay neglected and derelict every time without exaggeration. There are steam trap components that need annual maintenance but, in many cases, have not been looked at in eighty years. The boiler labours away, turning on and off every few minutes.
The church is either freezing or overheated. In one church I found nearly every steam radiator air vent broken or completely dysfunctional and the boiler water level safety mechanism completely impacted with mud from decades of neglect. What they didn’t know was that the church was one bad day away from the boiler exploding and taking most of the building and its occupants with it.
In another church, I was trying to solve a small mystery and was crawling down a tight, twenty-foot-long tunnel only to find something completely unexpected. We were trying to repair a one-hundred-year-old church steam heating system and stumbled across a steam trap that they did not know was in the basement for “…as long as I have been here” which was the answer given from the caretaker who had been working there for fifty years. Time-wise it was longer because he had inherited the position from another.
I found a board bolted to a wall that held pitch forks, shovels, and the like. Behind it lay the answer to the mystery in the tunnel. The church was cold and, for as long as anyone could possibly remember, there was an enormous heating coil buried behind the pitch forks. The steam trap had failed decades ago, and the heating coil was filled with stagnant water for just “…as long as I have been here”- decades.
The second story is of a facility half the age of the church mentioned previously. This is one of my all-time favourites.
I was making my way through a tiny crawl space to investigate the realities and to the right of me, in the dark, was a squeaky, old 5hp fan that was installed in the 1950’s. In front of me was an electrical disconnect switch that was used to disengage the electrical power from the fan. The fan was powered using three phases of electricity and was supposed to have three fuses. I opened the fuse box. Fuse, fuse, screwdriver. No kidding. I guess they ran out of fuses. By the way, the people in charge of maintenance were the same people in charge of energy efficiency in the building. Now, imagine trying to explain energy efficiency devices and systems to a “trained, qualified, certified” maintenance and management staff that will replace a fuse with a screwdriver. You start looking for refrigerators on their porches.
Please feel free to contact me to discuss energy efficiency and energy optimization or a project that you are working on.
Until next time...
James P. Moore
President
4EL Energy
www.jamespmoorecom
email: james@jamespmoore.com
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