The big project unveiled

The university built the building in which I work around 1987. It seems our university still saw A/C as a bit of a luxury at the time and accordingly designed our building with the bare minimum to keep the offices at 78 deg. during the summer. As you might guess our professors and graduate students don't find this acceptable and with the proliferation of computers, monitors, office over crowding, etc. many of the offices actually run in the lower 80's.

Various folks have investigated this problem over the years and come to the same conclusion, insufficient air flow to the offices. Solution, complete replacement of the entire system at our department's expense.

Several months ago while reading one of my HVAC engineering magazines I came across a listing of seminars at the upcoming HVAC Expo, one of them mentioned loop duct design. This triggered a memory of another article on loop piping in a chemical plant. Eureka! Our building a perfect candidate for conversion to a loop duct system as the existing office system 80% of the way there already.

I e-mailed the author of the paper and eventually the original author in Britain. Turns out this concept indeed very promising for our building. Doing so will increase the air moving capacity of the existing ductwork by about 50%, at the same static pressure. Normally to increase air flow you have to increase the static pressure in the ductwork in order to shove the extra air through, this requires bigger fans and motors. With the loop design we essentially give the air two paths instead of one to get where it needs to go, allowing extra air flow without needing extra pressure. This opens up the possibility of increasing our total air flow without having to replace the main fans in the penthouse. A huge cost savings as the existing fans the size of a small house! This all said, cooling the offices down will take more air flow, how much more will determine whether it's reasonable to think the existing fans and cooling coils can handle the extra load. At this point I realized I needed to know how much air flow each individual office really needs to maintain 74 deg. during the summer.

Hence the beginning of the big project. Commercial cooling load design software costs thousands of dollars, but the process really not that complicated, just lots of numbers to crunch and tables to reference. Various books available that outline the process and reprint all the pertinent tables. Years ago I had constructed a spreadsheet to ease this task when our church contemplated building an addition. I started on a design for the heating and cooling systems using this spreadsheet. I simply took the parts of the tables that apply to Lansing and inputted them into various lookup tables and then set up a place to enter the room data and display the results.

Zoom ahead 10 years, now I'm trying to do this for 100 - 150 rooms vs. the 20 in our church's addition. Amazingly, the old (Version 2 I think) Lotus 123 spreadsheet loaded into the modern version of Excel (Office XP) and worked w/ very little modification! (Anyone thinking God must have played a part in this?) For the past 3 month's or so I've upgraded the spreadsheet to automatically build an output data table made up of the load values for each room at different times of day and constructed a new spreadsheet to calculate the totals by floor and for the whole building. I've also had to go through and measure all the rooms, count lights, number of people, etc and find out what kind of glass they used as the each office has wall to wall windows that take up 1/3 of the outside wall.

I'm about 3/5 of the way through the building and things are looking promising. Our building a VAV (Variable Air Volume) design, meaning the thermostats on the wall regulate the volume of cool air entering each office to control the temperature vs. older designs that used heating coils in the ductwork to simply warm the cool air back up if things got too chilly. Our building still has the heating coils for winter time, but for most of the summer they stay closed. Each pair of offices has a box above the ceiling with the control damper and heating coil. As you might guess we will need bigger boxes in order to increase the air flow. We always assumed they would cost a bundle. Actually they cost about 1/4 of what we thought and it turns out we can upgrade the capacity of many of the existing boxes by simply changing out one part.

This all very exciting to me, so much so I dove in with both feet. I'm still excited, but realize I need to proceed a bit slower, so I can keep the rest of my life in balance.

Tonight a big milestone, as I'm pretty sure I've completed all the major changes needed to the spreadsheet to get an accurate result which also looks pretty enough to present to a group. I'm tickled with all the formatting features in modern spreadsheets. I've made generous use of different font sizes, borders and colors to help separate the important from the simply included for reference. Hopefully I've done so in a way most will find tasteful rather than loud and busy.

Now I need to input the room data for the last 30 rooms I surveyed and collect the info. for the remaining 30 or so rooms. Then I'll know if the grand totals fall into a range that the existing equipment in our penthouse can accommodate.

Why do they do that?

I mentioned watching the latest addition to my DVD collection. For a long time I debated whether I should by any DVD's at all. If you take a hard financial look at the whole venture, buying DVD's a terrible investment. You can rent them for a $1, so you'd have to watch each movie 10, 15, 20 times before you'd see any payback. Of course buying DVD's not about saving money, it's about having all those cool cases lined up in a row and impressing your friends with your great taste in movies. I read an article a while back about how many folks never even take the plastic wrapping off, they just buy them and add them to the "line up".

As a follower of Christ, conspicuous consumption not an option, so I've really struggled with this. I finally felt at piece with the notion that I do like movies a lot, the list of movies I like enough to watch more than once not all that huge and it's very convenient to have them at your finger tips rather than running to the video store every time your in the mood to watch something. I made a list of which movies I wanted to buy, a bit longer than I expected, but reasonable. So every time I'm in Target, Sams Club, Best Buy or Circuit City I check out the DVD's.

My latest find, the Bruce Willis flick, Mercury Rising. Mind you, Mercury Rising didn't win any Emmy's, but I've always liked it. Something about the Simon character touches a part of me, I usually cry a couple times, so it made it on the list. While looking at Circuit City for something else, I scanned the DVD's and came across it for $7. I prefer to pay $10 or less whenever possible, so I picked it up and watched it tonight. Cried three times this time.

Question: Why don't they put the nice little flyers in the cases half the time? I opened up my nice new DVD and all I find inside, one DVD. I like that little slip of paper with the chapter list on it, comes in handy at times. Come on guys, does it really save that much money to leave it out?

Gettin down to business

For the last couple years I've had a terrible time getting stuff down around my house. Just not much endurance, get pooped out so easily. Focusing so much time on the project from work has restored some of my energy, I'm better able to focus on stuff now, at least before I got a bit burned out this weekend.

A couple weekends ago I went out and bought a bunch of clear plastic storage containers. I wanted to get the clear ones, even they cost more, so I can see the stuff inside at a glance without having to lift all the lids off. The first batch worked out real well so I set out this weekend to get some more and return a couple sizes that didn't work out.

I figured on picking them up after eating dinner with my folks Fri. night. That didn't work out, ended up spending about 3 hours helping a guy at work replace the alternator on his Jimmy, so I got to my parents late, never made it to the stores. New plan, spend a couple hours Sat. afternoon picking up the stuff. Try 5 stores, 7 hours. Takes me so long to shop, I like to look at everything thoroughly and weigh all the options. I did find some great containers, especially for small stuff, in the fishing dept. at Meijer of all places. They had like 10 different kinds, with movable dividers and nice strong latches. Between shopping and attending our neighborhood block party I felt wiped out Sat. night. Today I've felt a bit sick, like I over did it, so I worked on computer stuff, went to a birthday party and watched the latest addition to my DVD collection. Something I haven't done for a couple months now.

I'm frustrated that I haven't put one thing in my nice shiny new containers, it feels as if I didn't do anything, since I had my mind set on filling them up and getting my couch cleared off. Telling myself it's OK, I did make a big step by buying them and having a game plan, now just to implement the plan over the next few days.

Impressive Fragility

In our day to day lives we take for granted the complex infrastructure that underpins our lives. An incredibly delicate web, really, of systems that are interdependent on each other. The last couple days at work have shown what happens when just one of these systems has a hiccup.

I work on lab equipment, cooler/freezers and building mechanical systems at a Big Ten university. I'm blessed to have a job I truly look forward to going to 90% of the time, lots of variety.

Among other things, we repair -80C freezers used for long term preservation of samples. They're big, expensive and break down every 3 - 5 years on average. Requiring about $1500 of parts to properly repair - 2 new compressors, new oil separator, 30' of capillary tubing and two high pressure shut off valves to ease future repairs. One of the labs had one go down a couple weeks ago at a very critical time and are desperate to have it running again, so we've done our best to hurry up the process which usually takes about a week once all the parts have arrived.

Well, I'm getting a bit sidetracked. Here we are in a side room off one of our large equipment rooms in the basement working away on this thing and poof we loose power. Gives new meaning to dark. Thankfully, the emergency generator worked, and after 30 sec or so about every 5th light in the hallways came back on. Just enough to see our tool cart and dig out our two flashlights.

So began a very interesting afternoon. First off, make sure no one stuck in the elevators - amazing no one in any of the three in our building. Go check the environmental rooms, all in alarm of course. Silence all the alarms and turn off the older units so they won't all come back on at the same instant and make a big power surge . . . gurgle, gurgle . . . Hmmm what's that? Steam coming out of the drain pipes!?!

Side note [The pumps in our building that pump the steam condensate back to the power plant on campus broke down a couple weeks ago so the pump shop took the pumps away and in the mean time are dumping the condensate down the drain]

I go in the main mechanical room and find steam and water blasting out of this drain pipe, whole room so hot and full of steam it fogs up my glasses. Try to shut off the steam supply to our building, can't budge the valves. Remember seeing the steam guys use a pipe wrench as an extension. Find ours, not big enough, find a bigger one, brace myself against the air compressor and push as hard as I can. I think it moved, push again, yes it did. Get all three lines shut off, after about 10 minutes rush of steam comes to a stop. You see, many big buildings use compressed air to operate the temperature controls. Remember those thermostats in school that hissed sometimes? No electricity, no air compressor. No air compressor, no controls. No controls, all the steam valves go wide open. We prop the door open and open up some access panels to help air out the room.

You get the picture. Without electricity the delicate web of services in our building ceased to work, making the building almost uninhabitable. No lights, computers, elevators, water on the upper floors (buildings over 3 or 4 stories need booster pumps for the upper floors) or mechanical ventilation for all the interior labs and offices. Everyone went home, out of the 200 or so people that work in our building, only 20 of us left when the power came back on 2 hours later.

In the end we ended up having two blackouts, two days in a row. Looks like they've got things ironed out now at our campus power plant. The news said the second outage caused by attempts to fix the problem that caused the first outage. How would you like to be that guy?

"Welcome home sweetheart, can you believe it, they had a second power outage today, isn't that just terrible? Ya. How'd your day go? Not so good. I'm sorry to her that honey, what happened? Well, me and Paul set out to work on the boiler that went down yesterday you see. Uh, huh. Ya, well anyway, I was real tired from everything yesterday and turned off the wrong one. Oh dear, let me give you a big hug ..."

Whenever this kind of thing happens it reminds me of how little it takes to throw our modern lives out of wack. It also reminds me of how much the Iraqis have suffered over the past 10 years or so. They had a very modern, middle class society w/ technologically advanced cities, top notch hospitals, . . . What would we do if we went from what we enjoy now to only having electricity 3 or 4 hours a day, water that doesn't always work, sewage sometimes backing up into our houses or 4 hour waits to get gas for our cars?

This post not meant as a commentary on the Iraq war, but just a reminder of how much we really have, and the delicate chorus that goes on behind the scenes that keeps the shelves full of every fruit and vegetable year round, home improvement centers fully stocked with goods, water safe to drink at virtually every faucet, electricity 24/7, our online purchases arriving at our front door within 2 days of placing the order, . . . humbling isn't it?

47 days ago

The big project I mentioned in my last blog, um, 47 days ago, pretty much took over my life. It's still not done, but I'm getting a bit burned out from it and have started to reflect on if the price worth the cost. As I look back on life I can see a pattern of getting totally engrossed in this and that to the total exclusion of most everything else. This doesn't strike me as healthy. So I'm slowing down on the big project so I can focus on other things, like putting posts up in my blog.