In the 1950s, the underground tunnel system was created at Bakersfield College to transport hot and cold water on the eastside of the campus. Now the “chiller loop” will be recreated to connect the Grace Van Dyke Bird Library, the BC bookstore and the Language Arts buildings.
“This is going to be just plain old pipes,” said Keith Keevil, manager of maintenance and operations.
The tunnel system from the campus east is big enough for people to walk through, but the new chiller loop will be underground, making it nonaccessible.
Using condensation, the three buildings will be connected by pipes to provide cold air in the buildings. These pipes will be connected to use one chiller at 85 percent efficiency for all three buildings.
“Now, all three buildings are running at 35 percent efficiency individually,” said Keevil. “However, once we connect them, we could use one chiller to cool off all three buildings.” Keevil said that this chiller system will save money and energy by shutting down two chillers and having one transport cold air through the buildings.
If one chiller is nonfunctioning, there are two more left to replace the broken one. According to Keevil, this project will cause efficiency and create redundancy.
The project was officially started on Sept. 30, by creating a barrier around the area where the trench will be located. The project is scheduled to be finished by the end of December.
“We chose this time because the chillers will not be used,” said Keevil. “We got a lot of complaints at the beginning of the semester because the LA building’s cold air didn’t work, so we want to avoid that.”
The trench will be six feet deep and eight feet wide, and it starts on the west side of the campus. Behind the bookstore’s parking lot, the lot will be dug up to insert the pipes. “We were originally going to cut down the tree,” said Keevil, pointing at the large tree in between the LA building and the bookstore, “but it’s best to dig up around it to save money.”
Cutting down the tree would have been thousands of dollars to replace, so the alternative was to dig up a little bit more of the parking lot.
The public parking lot behind the bookstores has needed renovation for quite some time, but according to Keevil, they knew that. “It didn’t make sense to make a nice parking lot, and after a couple of months, we tear it up. The school will get a new parking lot. That’s a nice reward.”
The chiller loop from the 1950s is being replicated to today’s time. “It was pretty advanced thinking at the time, but those tunnels cost a lot of money and time, so now we are using just pipes,” said Keevil.
The old chiller loop and the new chiller loop will provide cold air effectively. But the Family and Consumer Education building and the Child Development Center are independently run by their own chiller. According to Keevil, these chillers are specially made for children’s safety.
The chiller is a machine that uses heat from water through a vapor-compressor. Using the refrigeration cycle, the air is transported by a large fan. These pipes will run at a higher efficiency rate.
“In the old days, bigger was better, but now we decreased the size to match our ‘go green’ projects,” said Keevil.