HVAC not needed
When I was young I attended a rural elementary school that was constructed in 1923. This building was constructed of mostly masonry products, but it did have hard wood floors in the classrooms with terrazzo in the hallways. It had a cafeteria and a auditorium with a gym floor. There were ten classrooms and the heat was a gravity flow coal furnace.
Sometime after I left that school they converted to a gas boiler with hot water heat. Then they discovered that they didn?’t really save any money because the boiler had to keep the heat on all night. The old coal gravity system cooled down if there was no one shoveling coal into it.
Then came the 70s and we find that the insulation that covered those hot water pipes was asbestos and it caused cancer. So they replaced that hot water system with a forced air gas system. They removed the asbestos at great expense. Since the building had large windows they could never regulate the heat in the building because the sun would shine in the south facing windows and sometimes it would affect the thermostat and the furnace wouldn?’t come on.
Then they renovated once more. They replaced the centrally located thermostat with zone thermostats all over the building. These zone thermostats then had to have motorized controlled dampers in the duct work to shut off heat or cooling to that zone. Oh! by the way since the windows were so big they replaced them also. Being a top of the line school they also gave control of the thermostats to a PC located in a broom closest (because they had a lot of female teachers who had learned how to pick the locks on the plastic covers on the thermostats) and this PC would control the heating and cooling of every zone of the building.
Mr. Clark had been with the school district since I was in school and he was not a computer geek to say the least. Some rooms in the school you could hang meat from and others were saunas. He never got the hang of that PC. He was lucky to fill out his time card with it. I heard he even shut the heat down to the low 50s an hour after the kids would leave and the janitors worked in the cold.
Now I attended that school for seven years. Yes it was cold in the winter mornings and we would huddle around the furnace room and watch Mr. Darst shovel coal into the furnace. You would be suprised just how fast it would heat the entire building. I never felt cold expect that short period of time in the mornings. In the spring and fall when it was hot we simply opened the windows. The large windows provided light, heat, and in the winter we all got to see outside and the world we were missing. Today our students go to school in a cave. The temps are kept at 72 degrees.
School officials have worked for over 80 years to improve the design and the engineering of that building. They spent a lot of money and it out lived many other buildings in the area. It provided as good if not a better education as these modern buildings. Last week they tore the building down and all they had to do was to go back to the coal gravity flow furnace and hire a person to shovel coal.
When I was young I attended a rural elementary school that was constructed in 1923. This building was constructed of mostly masonry products, but it did have hard wood floors in the classrooms with terrazzo in the hallways. It had a cafeteria and a auditorium with a gym floor. There were ten classrooms and the heat was a gravity flow coal furnace.
Sometime after I left that school they converted to a gas boiler with hot water heat. Then they discovered that they didn?’t really save any money because the boiler had to keep the heat on all night. The old coal gravity system cooled down if there was no one shoveling coal into it.
Then came the 70s and we find that the insulation that covered those hot water pipes was asbestos and it caused cancer. So they replaced that hot water system with a forced air gas system. They removed the asbestos at great expense. Since the building had large windows they could never regulate the heat in the building because the sun would shine in the south facing windows and sometimes it would affect the thermostat and the furnace wouldn?’t come on.
Then they renovated once more. They replaced the centrally located thermostat with zone thermostats all over the building. These zone thermostats then had to have motorized controlled dampers in the duct work to shut off heat or cooling to that zone. Oh! by the way since the windows were so big they replaced them also. Being a top of the line school they also gave control of the thermostats to a PC located in a broom closest (because they had a lot of female teachers who had learned how to pick the locks on the plastic covers on the thermostats) and this PC would control the heating and cooling of every zone of the building.
Mr. Clark had been with the school district since I was in school and he was not a computer geek to say the least. Some rooms in the school you could hang meat from and others were saunas. He never got the hang of that PC. He was lucky to fill out his time card with it. I heard he even shut the heat down to the low 50s an hour after the kids would leave and the janitors worked in the cold.
Now I attended that school for seven years. Yes it was cold in the winter mornings and we would huddle around the furnace room and watch Mr. Darst shovel coal into the furnace. You would be suprised just how fast it would heat the entire building. I never felt cold expect that short period of time in the mornings. In the spring and fall when it was hot we simply opened the windows. The large windows provided light, heat, and in the winter we all got to see outside and the world we were missing. Today our students go to school in a cave. The temps are kept at 72 degrees.
School officials have worked for over 80 years to improve the design and the engineering of that building. They spent a lot of money and it out lived many other buildings in the area. It provided as good if not a better education as these modern buildings. Last week they tore the building down and all they had to do was to go back to the coal gravity flow furnace and hire a person to shovel coal.
