The city named after an American Indian tribe is the state’s second largest and home of one of the greatest urban waterfalls in the world: Spokane, WA. For millennia, the area has been the ancestral land of its original inhabitants, the Salish-speaking Spokane tribe. Today, it’s known for its great diversity and air quality.
The city, founded in 1881 with 350 settlers in the far northeast of the state, has 230,000 residents today – though its population is expanding steadily.
Recently, Spokane managers and educators brought attention to the city through keen attention to the quality of education it offers to students. Illustrative of this has been the recent construction of two new schools in the Mead school district, both of which are also regarded as expressions of educational excellence and superb energy efficiency.
The largest of Mead school district’s new facilities, now home to more than 750 students – and with a capacity of 800 children in grades 6, 7 and 8 – is the Highland Middle School, completed in 2020. The two-story, 140,000-square-foot facility cost the district $38 million to construct.
Highland Middle School is an efficiency masterpiece – and the largest architecture on a primarily residential prairie. The school was designed by Spokane-based ALSC Architects.
Classroom groupings provide a “village” feel and appearance, enabling students to build stronger relationships with other students and their teachers. This also reduces the time to move between classes, providing greater opportunity for social interaction.
Graham Construction and Management Inc. won the call to serve as GC for the project. The school now includes three classroom wings, 32 classrooms, band and choir rooms, tech labs, two gymnasiums, a wrestling room and common dining area.
The school’s design won Spring ‘22 Learning by Design Educational Facilities Design Awards Outstanding Project recognition for new construction, as well as a Merit Award by Spokane AIA. The school sits on a gently rolling 23 acre site. Its $315 per-square-foot cost translates to $315 s.f. cost per student.
Groundbreaking to occupancy
In 2019, construction of the school began. Graham Construction chose Spokane-based Professional Piping, Inc. for all plumbing and hydronic systems mechanical work. Family-owned “Pro Piping” is a union shop (Local 44 Plumbers and Pipefitters) with about 40 employees and offers a surprisingly diverse range of plumbing and mechanical systems work.
According to Dave Powell, Pro Piping’s VP of Estimating, Pro Piping’s focus, from the beginning, has been industrial, commercial, municipal, multi-housing and educational in nature – comprising about 80 percent of their work – and residential projects, making up the balance.
Professional Piping dates back to the 2008 recession, when Whit Bendewald and Garry Baumgartner founded the firm, based on their strong faiths and work ethic, dedication to craft, and a desire to provide exceptional service.
The breadth of Pro Piping’s design-build work includes engineering design, custom piping, oil and gas piping, welding and cutting, backflow testing, medical gas, steam and condensate, system commissioning and heat transfer systems that include steam-to-water, waste heat recovery, ground-source and water-to-water heat pump systems, and process heating and cooling.
Today, Professional Piping is one of the leading full-service plumbing and mechanical contractors in the Inland Northwest. Powell modestly sums-up their performance; he says “we don’t cut corners.”
According to Bendewald, Pro Piping crews were on site at Highland school for 16 months, start to finish. “School jobs are our sweet spot, but we have to work hard to maintain our reputation regionally. We install a lot of commercial boilers,” he added, “so we have to depend on equipment we’ve come to know and trust. We select equipment with great care.”
Hydronics at Highland
“The engineer’s specifications called for a four-pipe hydronic system at the Highland school,” explained Bendewald. “They’re more expensive to install, but they handily outperform two-pipe systems. A four-pipe system can heat and cool at the same time, which is useful for buildings with different temperature requirements in different areas. They also permit easy dehumidification, and provide greater operational efficiency.”
With specification for a four-pipe, primary-secondary design – with circulation provided by pumps governed by VFDs, the school’s heating and cooling system became optimally versatile immediately after commissioning. “This gives school managers the ability to run the system at lower capacity without effecting the equipment minimum flow requirements, especially during the shoulder seasons,” explained Bendewald.
Bendewald added that this was important because of the widely-varying room uses, year-round – especially considering the need for consistency in comfort for classrooms, admin areas, and music. Gym and locker areas require heating or cooling, and rigorous dehumidification, even when other parts of the school require very different climate control.
Mechanical recipe
Pro Piping managers installed three, 1.9 million BTU output, 95 percent thermal efficiency Thermal Solutions’ Arctic condensing boilers for installation at the Highland school. All were used for space heating. The Thermal Solutions line includes 11 sizes of natural gas boilers in sizes from 1,000 MBH to 6,000 MBH).
Arctic boilers, available fully-packaged, or as knock-downs, use flexible no-weld water tubes that have long been the workhorse of the boiler industry. The Arctic’s water tubes – superb at absorbing and transferring the intense burner heat into water for distribution – naturally flex and move with expansion and contraction that occurs in heating. With no welds, the Arctic permits field access for tube replacement making it the only field repairable heat exchanger in the condensing market.
“The Thermal Solutions Arctic boilers have certainly held up their end,” continued Bendewald. “They’re very well built and easy to set. The user interface is very intuitive and easy to work with, so commissioning them is smooth and predictable. With 20:1 turndown, they also offer terrific flexibility. We get parts quickly, if needed, and product support is great. And, with our reps at Mechanical Sales [MSI], Thermal Solutions is also well represented.”
In addition to the Thermal Solutions boilers, Pro Piping installed two, 114-ton Carrier scroll chillers at the school. All heating and cooling systems, including air handlers that permitted fresh air ventilation, were connected to 68 fan coil terminal units installed throughout the school. In addition, there are three cabinet heaters for heat provision in large common areas.
“Mechanical Sales worked with Mead School district, Pro Piping and MSI Engineering to provide Thermal Solutions Artic Boilers and other technologies on this school and throughout the district,” said Randy Seamen, MSI Spokane team leader.
“This gave us opportunities to provide the customer with highly efficient, maintenance-friendly equipment,” he added. “We also provide local technical service and support ensuring peace of mind when it comes to meeting system requirements and construction deadlines. This ensures that each school year starts with durable, mechanical systems that save energy, time, and valuable resources.”
Pro Piping typically sends in the same teams to do initial ground work and rough-ins, and then again, later, to finish set-work as plumbing and mechanical systems are tied together to become operational. Randy Chudy was journeyman plumber and foreman on the Highland School project for Professional Piping. Mitchell Griffiths, MSI sales technician, managed Pro Piping’s need to perform all of the boiler start-up and commissioning work.
“For schools, we’re typically not involved in the later service and maintenance work, though that becomes an important facet to our work for many other types of work, such as for restaurants, multi-housing and industrial locations,” explained Powell.
Travis Bown, Director of Maintenance and Operation for the school district, said that he “specified all the equipment as our most highly desired spec within our best practices manual.” Bown also explained that he worked on the project with Chad Brayton, Mead School District Building Trades Foreman.
Stewardship
Just half a mile from the Highland school is the recently-completed Skyline Elementary, a smaller school also served by Thermal Solutions boilers, connected to a four-pipe system with a similar arrangement of terminal units.
For the Mead School District’s superintendent and maintenance department, key responsibilities also come with the job: to be responsible stewards of district funds, the safety and security of the district’s buildings, and to provide a comfortable learning environments where students and teachers can thrive.
In 2019, Washington state enacted House Bill 1257, known as the Clean Buildings bill, which established broad energy efficiency targets. So it was no surprise that the school district’s facilities came under close internal scrutiny. Older buildings, with aging equipment and more “porous” building envelopes, were most closely scrutinized, though newer facilities, and even those on the drawing boards, weren’t ignored.
Mead’s maintenance director worked closely with Avista Utilities managers to identify cost and energy savings, and the school district’s teachers, as well, to get feedback on what they were experiencing in the classrooms, trained them on maximizing comfort, resulting in greatly improved Energy Use Intensity (EUI) scores within just a few months.
EUI is a metric that examines a building's energy efficiency by expressing its energy use relative to size. It's calculated by dividing the total amount of energy a building uses in a year by its total gross floor area and is often expressed as energy per square foot or meter per year.
The rapid decrease in building EUIs not only created a much more efficient use of energy, but it caught the attention of a number of state and national industry experts and agencies.
“In the four years I’ve served on the [district’s] school board, I’ve seen the tremendous value that the district provides to students and families,” said Michael Cannon, Mead school board president. “Our district budget is funded at federal, state and local levels; one thing we all agree on is the priority for high-quality schools and programs. It’s why most of us moved here. We chose Mead specifically for the excellent educational experience our kids could receive – and for its fiscally responsibility, meaning stewardship of tax dollars.
“We knew we'd have a few lean years after COVID, and we're now in those years,” he added. “We’re making necessary adjustments each year to do more with less. Mead provides the best financial value for any district in the region.”
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By John Vastyan
