When the first warm days of spring arrive, people go to the Oval, throw a Frisbee and remember what life is like without gray skies and ice.
In Hagerty Hall, building coordinator Karen Sobul’s phone starts ringing because the air conditioning is not turned on.
“I’ll get many, many calls,” she said. “(I) think that people have their expectation that I have some control over it, and I have almost no control over it whatsoever. My job as building coordinator is to advocate for my building.”
That means calling Physical Facilities with the problem.
Peter Calamari, assistant director of maintenance, said the heating and cooling systems used in many campus buildings are not like the systems familiar to most people.
“It’s not like a house where you have a little window unit or a thermostat,” he said.
Chiller towers, which cool down water used in the air cooling process, are a part of many campus air conditioning systems. Ron Sharpe, senior engineer of utilities, said the towers will be damaged if they aren’t drained when temperatures drop below freezing. For this reason, maintenance has to wait until the danger of below-freezing temperatures has passed before they get the systems running.
Calamari said, as a general rule, it is warm enough to start the systems by April. If it gets unseasonably hot before then, as it did several weeks ago, there is not much they can do.
It also takes time for campus maintenance to get the chiller towers ready to go. Sharpe said it was similar to a car engine that has not been run in awhile. Starting it up at full speed without any preparation can tear up the system.
It is the same way with a chiller tower, he said.
“It’s not an on-off machine,” he said. “They’re big machines, they can be temperamental, and we can damage the system if we just turn it on and off.”
Sharpe said once they start up they run constantly throughout the summer.
Andrew Sharp can be reached at [email protected].
