HiRise and LoRise residents had to shiver and grit their teeth while taking their morning showers this past Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings, due to mechanical complications in the water heaters.
“This was something we couldn’t predict,” said Assistant Director of Mechanical Trades at Physical Plant Mike Conte. “But we got lucky when it came to fixing this kind of problem. On other occasions it usually takes days and days.”
Physical Plant was first alerted that something was wrong on Sunday night. A parent helping a student move into LoRise A called to report a power outage, unrelated to the subsequent problems with the water heaters. After arriving on the scene, Conte noticed a sizeable amount of steam coming out of a manhole on the street corner, evidence of a steam linkage.
Steam is fed to the major facilities on campus from the Central Power Plant on William Street, piped underground to HiRise into two water heaters.
“That particular steam vault has given us a lot of trouble over the years,” Conte said in reference to the steam vault connected to HiRise. “In this case, the sub pump had failed because it had rotted off. That was why steam was blowing off constantly.”
Conte blamed the intrusion of rain and groundwater for the deterioration of the pipes.
The steam leak worsened over Sunday night, and several HiRise residents repeatedly called Public Safety and Physical Plant to report a lack of heat.
Monday morning, a Physical Plant crew arrived to turn off the steam, consequently turning off the hot water. While the steam vault was a relatively simple problem to fix, however, what followed was a failure in the air compressor.
“The air compressor failed that provides control air to all the pneumatic controls for the mechanicals, including the water heaters,” Associate Director of Residential Life Maureen Islieb explained in an e-mail to affected residents. “The timing is unimaginable.”
Meanwhile, HiRise residents continued to take extremely brief showers in the morning.
“I felt as if I had no choice but to clench my teeth and step straight into the ice-cold water for two days in a row,” said Evan O’Loughlin ’08. “The only way to stave off the onset of hypothermia would be to step under the water for ten seconds at a time before stepping right back out again.”
Conte said that the failure of the air compressor was the main cause of the delay in getting hot water running again.
“Before we could send a crew down there, we had to air out the vault,” he said. “It was 200 degrees in there. It took a good five, six hours before we could send someone in.”
Fortunately, the replacement air compressor was already on campus and only had to be wired into the system. Otherwise, students would have had to continue living in chilly conditions for an even longer period of time.
Part of the reason the hot water was so quick to disappear was that the current steam vaults are small, energy-efficient models.
“They’re the best industrial water heaters you can buy,” Conte said. “But the one drawback of energy efficiency machines is the lack of storage capacity.
Because of the smaller size of the machines, there is less hot water on reserve to respond to mechanical complications.
”As soon as you lose any steam, you lose hot water,“ Conte said. ”That’s why it was so noticeable. The hot water comes quickly, but then it also leaves quickly.“
The older steam vault models in HiRise had much greater storage capacity, but were replaced 10 years ago by the more energy-efficient system after the lining in the larger steam vault began rotting away.
HiRise residents could hop in hot showers again Wednesday morning.
Physical Plant will perform another complete inspection of the heating system after Commencement, which will be May 27.
”The whole thing was a culmination of cause and effects, none of them related to each other, but all impacting the hot water just the same,“ Conte said.
HiRise Residential Advisor Peter Hill ’08 summed up the experience.
”I’m just glad to be showering,“ Hill said.
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