Seeking a Solution
The church’s pastor, Monsignor Joseph Gentili, has recently taken keen interest in curbing energy consumption in addition to raising the bar on facility maintenance and beautification.
One of Weikel’s latest initiatives at the church has been to improve energy efficiency. He audits the electric and gas bills and plans property upgrades accordingly. This past year, all large light fixtures in the church were upgraded to LED. The desire to lower the church’s carbon footprint played a role in selecting a boiler solution.
“Ultimately, the solution that Good and ROI Marketing provided was, we thought, the best for energy efficiency and longevity,” said Weikel. “Their plan was to install high-efficiency boilers, maintain the redundancy that saved us last winter, and provide a way for the maintenance team and myself to monitor the system remotely.”
Good’s plan was to replace all the existing boilers with two, 650 MBH Citadel condensing boilers, made by U.S. Boiler Company, while modifying the boiler room for primary-secondary piping. To provide remote system access requested by the church, a tekmar 294 Boiler Control was installed. This provides remote monitoring of individual zone temperatures and more.
The existing system pumps were serviceable and weren’t old enough to warrant replacement.
“The church effectively had a four-to-one turndown rate with the old boilers,” said Landis. “The new dual-Citadel system can modulate between 65,000 and 1.3 million BTUH. That was a big advantage considering the giant heating demand swings the facility sees. Finally, if low return water temperatures had caused the original boilers to fail, that’s of no concern with condensing boilers.”
To achieve the highest turndown possible, Prevost specified the Citadel boiler over other condensing models on his line card. Passageways through the stainless-steel, water tube heat exchanger are also larger.
“This boiler meets ASME code CSD1 out of the box because the low water cutoff is already mounted,” said Prevost. “The boiler also has a high limit control, but we add a second, external high limit control to make inspection a lot quicker.”