With Moscow’s unpredictable weather, preparation is needed to ensure appropriate heating and cooling is available to students and faculty year-round.
The University of Idaho continues to improve its heating and ventilation system, using eco-friendly resources that save millions of dollars every year. Recent improvements include a chilled water tank and ventilation system upgrades.
Richard Nagy, UI’s resource conservation manager, said the university is always looking for more efficient ways to control the Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems and install updates to a couple buildings each year.
“A $30 million bond that will be spent at the end of this school year, helped upgrade the older buildings on campus to have more efficient heating-cooling systems,” Nagy said. “Recently, we have made energy conservation more effective by controlling individual rooms to specific temperatures, which enables us to reduce the amount of energy at night when the buildings aren’t being used.”
Nagy said the university’s water chilling system didn’t have enough chillers to support a lot of the campus buildings, so a chilled water plant was built to increase circulation between chillers and steam absorption chillers. This helps increase production of the cold water that is distributed throughout the university, Nagy said.
The water tank near UI’s golf course, finished during fall 2010, holds two million gallons of water and has lowered its electric usage by about 50 percent, Nagy said.
“This allows us to make chilled water without using electricity. It is run during the night when the water is being chilled, but stops during the day and provides chilled water to the university,” Nagy said.
Recently the Jensen Engineering Building, Ridenbaugh Hall and the Niccolls Building were added to the system that disperses chilled water to other buildings on campus.
Although efficient cooling is an important campus facility, winters in Moscow make effective heating a vital part of keeping everyone at the university safe, and the steam plant on Line and Sixth streets, is a central part of UI’s history and its heating system.
The steam plant produces steam to provide hot water and space heating with a cooling process through absorption chillers to 48 central buildings on campus, Mike Lyngholm, steam plant manager said.
“The steam plant is fueled by a biomass boiler that uses the renewable energy source of wood chips and produces 90 percent of the steam needed to heat the university,” Lyngholm said. “Wood chips replace the use of natural gas and cost about one third of the price.”
The steam plant runs year-round, 24 hours a day, seven days a week and sends steam through an underground pipe system that provides heat to the buildings, Lyngholm said. By using wood chips instead of natural gas, the university saves about $2 million each year, Lyngholm said .
“The wood chips are a renewable energy source stored in a cylinder west of the Kibbie Dome that is able to holds thousands of tons of wood chips,” Lyngholm said.
The plant provides the steam needed for hot water and heat for the university, but the modernized computer system regulates the temperatures of individual buildings and their rooms throughout the university.
Dave Hamilton, UI energy operations specialist, said he can view and regulate the temperature of every building on campus from a system in his office.
“We are able to reduce the temperatures within the buildings at night so the full amount of energy isn’t being used all the time, only when it’s needed,” Hamilton said. “Now we can set specific degrees for higher during the day and lower at night.”
Because the amount of air volume that is being distributed varies, it is more proactive and saves the university energy that would have been used at night if it were running full-speed, Hamilton said.
“UI is about 25 years ahead of the other institutions that are just now starting to use renewable energy — we have been doing it since 1986,” Lyngholm said. “I am proud of the carbon footprint that UI provides and will continue to provide to the environment in the future.”