ICC Prepares to Fire Up New Boilers

EAST PEORIA — Starting in October, the East Peoria Campus may start to feel a little more comfortable as Illinois Central College finishes installing five new boilers in the heart of the Academic Building.

ICC’s facilities services director Kevin Roberts said that these new boilers will be the future source of warmth for the majority of the campus’s buildings, but right now they are still just working to get them connected.

This process began back in May when the ICC Board of Trustees approved the financial investment that this project was going to require. Peoria-based Mechanical Services, Inc. was awarded the job of acquiring and installing the boilers after their low bid of $746,550 to complete the project.

According to project records, the three old boilers that have helped make the East Peoria Campus livable since its creation in 1974 are nearing the end of their life cycle. It could be assumed that the new boilers would be much like these old ones, but, in reality, they have hardly anything in common.

Firstly, the old Kewanee boilers are bright orange and about the size of a large SUV, while, as Roberts attests, the new grayish-blue L.E.S. boilers are relatively compact.

“After removing a couple of pieces, the new boilers actually fit on the elevator.” Roberts said with a smile.

Secondly, more versatile power settings offer greatly improved efficiency with the new boilers. As explained by Ryan Holmes, vice president of mechanical engineering at Midwest Engineering Professionals Inc., a design firm working with ICC on the project, the old boilers had the power settings of “100 percent, 50 percent, and off” while the new ones have, in combination, dozens of possible output levels. This will allow ICC to get just the right amount of heat to match any level of need, eliminating wasted energy and improving heating quality.

According to Holmes, this precise control will come into play especially during summer, when a small amount of heating is needed to prevent the buildings from becoming too cool from air conditioning.

Additionally, the new boilers have a different way of transferring warmth to the building, explained Holmes. In fact, it is somewhat ironic to even call them boilers because they are designed NOT to boil water. Rather, these new units are built to circulate 130-degree heated water throughout the campus to provide warmth.

This, said Holmes, is a much more cost-effective method for the College. According to him, only huge college campuses like the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign can justify the use of steam systems anymore. So this is just another form of modernizing at ICC.

However, this change from steam to warm water requires more than just changing the boilers–it requires that old steam-focused infrastructure in the buildings be replaced, too, but I this will take years to fully accomplish. Meanwhile, two of the old boilers will stay to operate during the transition. Ultimately, every building on campus, minus the CourgarPlex, which was build with its own modern system, will be serviced by the five new boilers.

“It will improve comfort levels…so that will be a good deal,” said Roberts, “but that’s a little ways off, so we’ll get that accomplished in the years to come. It all really does depend on making sure that we do have funding set aside to make that happen because it is a big undertaking.”

On Oct. 10 the new boiler setup is scheduled to undergo its first start-up as Roberts prepares to “run it through its paces.” But he joked that even as they get tested, the building should stay comfortable. The only ones to feel the heat will be the boilers themselves.