The chiller at Ping Center is working again after a mechanical malfunction Thursday.
The Ping Center chiller is back up and running as of Thursday afternoon after being down for part of the day because of a mechanical malfunction.
“The Ping chiller is back up. Our team is monitoring it, but the temperatures are dropping in the building,” Steve Wood, executive director of facilities management, said
The Ping chiller did not start Thursday morning, Wood said.
Joseph Lalley, senior associate vice president for information technologies and administrative services, said Ping’s chiller is the same kind of chiller found in Copeland and Ellis halls, both of which have had mechanical difficulties during the Fall Semester.
“They are very inefficient chillers,” Lalley said.
In September, classes in Ellis Hall were cancelled because of a broken air conditioner, and the chiller in Copeland Hall failed later that month.
At the Board of Trustees meeting Friday, chiller replacements were approved for both Ellis and Copeland halls.
“The significance here is that we are getting rid of a number of very old inefficient steam chillers and replacing them with more efficient chillers or in the case of Ping, a much more efficient way to cool the building,” Lalley said.
By the end of next summer, the Ping chiller will be tied into the central chilled water distribution system, Wood said.
The hot water has also been restored at Ping, although Wood said the outage wasn’t related to the chiller.
“We had a water outage on Sunday and a steam outage to Ping that started Sunday evening and went through Wednesday,” Wood said. “That was to complete some work associated with the Ping steam line replacement project, and once we had that work complete yesterday we were able to turn that hot water back on.”
Students who used the facilities at Ping noticed the heat.
“I hate that it’s hot, but it wasn’t too hot," Kelleen Harrison, a sixth year senior studying nursing who used the elliptical, said. "It wasn’t unbearable. It was nice because it got me sweating more."
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