School Boiler System Redesign

School Saves on Maintenance and Fuel Costs

Client: A Local Catholic School
Location: Northeast Ohio, Akron, Portage County

Problem

A local, Northeast Ohio Catholic school in Portage County had been a client of ours for some time. Over the years we had been maintaining their old, 1970’s-vintage two-steam-boiler system, which, as it aged, had developed leaks in the sections, piping, and valves. Because of the time period in which their system had been designed, it was oversized. Each boiler had enough capacity to heat the school on its own. The second boiler created a completely redundant system.

Solution

Our solution consisted of the following.

• We performed an engineering analysis of the heat requirements and determined that we could replace the two existing steam boilers with two, much smaller, high-efficiency, hot water, RBI Futera boilers.
• We resized the header piping to accommodate the new two-hot-water-boiler system.
• We stripped out all of the existing pneumatic controls and installed new Honeywell direct digital controls.
• By moving to a high efficiency hot water system and installing new Honeywell direct digital controls, we now have the ability to stage the operation of the already-efficient boilers such that on days with a mild outside air temperature, the boilers now run at a small percent of their total capacity. This in turn yields a large energy savings over the course of the school’s heating season.

Equipment

• Two high-efficiency RBI-Futera Hot Water Boilers
• Honeywell Direct Digital Controls