2009 Issue

22 Control systems were either pneumatic or electric, and some of the older pneumatic systemair compressors didn’t even have after-coolers. I remember seeing thermostats with oil streaks running down the wall, and they were still working. It wasn’t all that uncommon to be called out to trouble shoot an old system, only to find the receiver on the control air compressor totally full of water, and the compressor cycling every minute. I recall getting dragged out of church one cold winter morning to run down to the new small animals building at the Hogle Zoo. The place was very hot inside and the birds were jumping off of the metal hand rails in the rain forest. I knew what I would find, and went directly to the mechanical room. The control air compressor wasn’t running, the air pressure was zero and all the heating valves had failed full open. I looked for the electrical disconnect, but couldn’t find it. I finally located it under a custodian’s heavy winter coat. He had used it as a hanger, and the heavy coat had tripped it. I re-set the disconnect, the compressor came on, the building cooled down, and I went home a hero. Being a hero has never been so easy! The custodian drove a nail in the wall for his new coat hanger. Individual room control? You’ve gotta be kiddin’! Most buildings were zoned North, East, West, South, and ‘interior’, and the windows were operable. The improvement of HVAC systems followed the technical advances in the control industry. As it became easier to control things, we did more controlling. Systems became more sophisticated, and owner demands for higher comfort levels increased. With the rise in energy costs, the demand for more energy efficient buildings increased, and this put more pressure on control contractors to give the engineers even sharper tools to work with. I remember when Honeywell and Johnson Controls came out with their first computer controlled energymanagement systems. That was years before hand held calculators and personal computers came into existence. That was an exciting time for us young engineers. We could now control everything from a central point at a somewhat unreasonable cost. But those systems were pretty much confined to the large university campus or similarly large industrial systems. School districts? Forget it. Way too expensive! They couldn’t afford the system maintenance contracts, let alone the initial cost, and energy was still fairly cheap. Then came the personal computer, and inexpensive little digital control panels. That changed everything for the smaller cash strapped institutions. That, and energy costs were now killing them. The first school district we automated with a personal computer based system was the Davis District, and we did it with a Radio Shack computer and some cheap little Paragon digital panels. We did the engineering and wrote the software, and the district installed it themselves. It was simple and very effective, and the best part was the district could do their own maintenance. When the school district superintendent asked me if I could guarantee him that an up-grade wouldn’t be obsolete in two years, I told him I could do better than that. I could guarantee him that it would be obsolete in sixmonths, but by then the up-grade would have paid for itself! We did some aggressive energy management. Among other things we shut off the corridor lights between classes, and ‘blacked out’ the schools completely after dark. A few years later, we piggy-backed a district wide security system on to the energy management system, and we immediately started catching burglars. I’ll tell ya’ kids, if you think saving energy is fun, catching burglars in the middle of the night is a real hoot! One night we caught two different sets of burglars in the same school! The fun part started once we had a confirmed intrusion. When we confirmed the activation of two or more sen- sors, and the police were called and in place around the school, the guy at the district’s central control in Clearfield (who was talking to the police on the radio) would start turning on corridor lights, and the startled burglars would start running. A floor plan of the school would pop up on his screen, and the motion detectors would start firing. This told the central operator exactly where the burglars were, and he would relay that information to the police. When the burglars ran out of the building (usually through the same door they came in) the police would be waiting, and they would nab them. The word spread pretty quickly amongst the local petty larceny crowd that burglarizing schools would get you locked up, so after a few months we usually only caught the occasional drifters and a few central city type air- men from Hill Air Force Base who were new in town. HAFB, to their credit, started including a warning about the Davis District’s alarm system in their orientation for new airmen, and that helped. Aword about hand drafting. Even seasoned draftsmen’s hands would get so fatigued lettering the equipment schedules that I kept a little hand held massage vibrator in my desk to squeeze a few more hours out of an aching hand when we were facing a deadline. That part of drafting I don’t miss. I’ve been accused by the guys in the office of doingmy first jobs with squid ink on papyrus scrolls, but that’s just a rumor! Mr. Peterson, a graduate of the University of Utah, has worked in the mechanical engineering field since 1959, and remains actively involved in the design and management of building mechanical systems. His notable projects include Salt Lake City International Airport and Delta Center in Salt Lake City. GOOD OLE’ DAYS — continued from page 21