August 22, 2007

I’m back from holiday, and they are working on the furnace room that supplies heat/air to the old hall and the chapel.  Here is the network of loops, and the circulating pump right over top.  It won’t be long until the Daycare in our building has their air conditioning back up and running.

July 15, 2007

Sunday July 15  The air conditioning is up and running.  We are the first Anglican Church on the island to enjoy the comfort of air conditioning.  Here is a picture of one of the units in the side aisle of the church.  It’s not too noisy, as we feared it might be.

Here are some more shots of the main furnace room as it stands now The largest of the heat pumps, you can the loops connected from this angle right in the front.

This is some of the controls.  We will have a total of six areas we can control separately,  each with their own programmable thermostat.  In the end, we will even be able to turn on the heat or the air from the telephone.  Imagine, lying in bed, calling in to the church to see if it is warm enough for you for the early service.  Lancelot Andrews certainly didn’t have such a luxury!

May 31, 2007

We don’t watch the technicians work every day, today  our church took a day  to go out birding at Cooper’s Marsh in Eastern Ontario.  Here is a picture of Margaret’s hand, and a visiting Chickadee.  There’s no use trying to do our part to preserve the environment if we don’t go out and enjoy it!

May 10, 2007

Last night they delivered the new heat pumps and here they are sitting in the basement hall.  The big one in the foreground will provide heat for the main church, the smallest will be used in the chapel

This is what it looks like in the main furnace room, the old furnaces are gone, there’s no turning back now.  Soon they will begin to reshape the plenums, which take the hot air from the furnace and direct it to the ductwork.  Then they will be able to move the heatpumps in, and begin to connect the ductwork, and the loops.  There is also a significant amount of electrical work to do

April 26, 2007

Today they almost finished the fairly intricate network of loops on the west side of the church; these come in from outside, right into the basement.  Notice there is one loop that is not included in the network.  This loop, by itself, will run out to one of the consoles in the main church, which will supply supplemental heat.  Otherwise the other four wells, are combined into one pipe that runs overtop and behind, into the main furnace room where the two large heat pumps will be connected.  A similar complex of loops will run into the small furnace room in the Old Hall, and service the two smaller heat pumps there.

April 11, 2007 - Today they are trenching the wells on the parking lot side.  Each well has its own entrance and exit tubing, entering the church under the back stairs, quite close to the furnace room for the church.  With this complete, they will have finished the outside work, (though we have some cleanup to do for sure). The tubing coming in looks quite comical, I think.   Now we wait until the furnaces are off for the summer, and our three oil burning furnaces will be replaced with four heat pumps.  I think they will start the final push in the beginning of May.

March 28, 2007  - It's only Wednesday, and already there are more pictures.  Here we see the construction crew feeding the tubing down the wells which will contain the fluid that circulates in a "closed loop".  And here they are filling the piping with a mixture of water and electrolytes.  The Drilling is finished on the chapel side, in fact it is completely finished today, and the crews are starting to clean up the muddy mess that surrounds our church.  I suspect that the kids in the daycare would love to get out into that mud....
 

March 25, 2007 - It's launch day at the church.  We have Dr. Andreas Athienitis here from Concordia to tell us about Alternative Energy Sources, and at the end of the service, we go out into the muddy parking lot to bless the wells which will heat our buildings.  Blessings from God all around.  A little bubbly helped spread the cheer!  (One of the things I found interesting was that Dr. Athienitis tells us that we are actually using a form of Solar Heating!!--after all the heat we are using originally comes from the sun, doesn't it?)

March 23, 2007  - The drillers have, in three days, drilled four wells, and have moved around to the other side, to drill four more.  (Eventually they will decide to drill only three here, and move the last well back into the parking lot).  They are drilling right beside the Old Chapel, which gives us a nice juxtaposition, the old and the new.    The other wells are finished and capped on the other side.

March 21, 2007 

March 20, 2007