Keeping It Hot

Just starting his shift at 3 p.m. Tuesday, Johnnie Olivas, of Crawford, a 17-year veteran at Chadron State’s Eugene Sheaman Heating Plant, prepares for the evening ahead of him. Though his job includes watching and recording heat, pressure, and water gauges for long periods of time, he, along with his co-workers, also have to clean out the two wood chip boilers, reload the wood chip bin, and perform any maintenance that comes up in the boiler house. The boiler room is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year by employees working eight hour shifts.

The boiler house does more than heat all of the buildings on campus, it also cools half of them; this is accomplished using eight-inch steam lines with enough pressure to not only distribute heat to the buildings and water sources, but also recycle the water that circulates around campus.

“You will never run out of hot water while taking a shower,” Olivas said.

Each day, employees dump 30 tons, about 700 tons a year, of woodchips into a wide bin that sits on top of an auger, which moves it from the bin to a conveyor belt that dumps into the two boilers. The boilers, also called fireboxes, are cleaned once a shift to prevent build-up of ash that would prevent the accumulation of heat that allows steam to flow through the fire tubes. The waste cleaned from the fireboxes is discarded onto another auger, which distributes it into an outside dumpster. The dumpster is emptied once a month.  This process heats about 1,300,000 square-feet across campus.

“We’re using something that would normally be a waste product to heat the college,” Olivas said.

Along with the main generators, there are a number of backup generators that allow for repairs, and have enough energy to keep the power on campus going. Olivas said if there were any kind of disaster, the heating plant is one of the few buildings on campus that would still be able to function.