A Day at Dartmouth

Earlier this week, work sent me up to Dartmouth (in Hanover, NH); it was an interesting job, and I've never been there before, so it was interesting to see the place. It is a beautiful campus; it is an Ivy League university up in the middle of nowhere--it felt like the archetype of the college town.


It was doing one of those days doing the stuff I love to do--crawling around the innards and roofs of buildings, checking out the infrastructure that makes them work. It's neat to see old machines that still work pretty well--old pneumatic HVAC controls; however, the drawback is that fewer and fewer people are trained to maintain this machinery. It is part of the reason why battleships were retired from the Navy after they were reactivated in the 1980's: there were not many sailors trained to be WW II-era boiler technicians, and even fewer young sailors wanted to step into a career in the new, fast-paced field of 1940's ship propulsion technology.


The job itself was quite interesting--we were operating as sub-consultants to a firm that is developing an energy efficiency retrofit plan for the school's buildings. The Dartmouth administrators should be lauded for their strategy: the school is adding buildings to their campus, increasing the demand on their central plant boilers. Instead of simply building new boilers, they are putting some of that money into improving efficiency of existing buildings to control demand, and avoid the need for more capacity (as well as recouping the savings over time).

Here's one of the buildings--a 1960's building by the same architect who designed Lincoln Center and the UN Building.


Unfortunately, it was built with classic 1960's International style technology, in the era when heating oil was cheap. As an aside, I went to a conference on preserving the buildings from the second half of the 20th century, and some presenters commented, "Um, do we want to? Many of them leak, suck down energy, and are uncomfortable."

This building was no exception--lack of insulation, and the entire north wall is single glazed windows in metal frames--yeah, basically, it has a wall made of storm windows. And that's in a location with 7900 heating degree days (it's a metric of how bad the heating season is: if you don't intrinsically speak in HDD, the USA today definition is much more reasonable than the Wikipedia version); as a comparison point, Boston is 5600, Minneapolis is 8000, Orlando is 700).

It was a good day, and it felt like we're working towards Good Things.