Shifting Toward Sustainability, Building by Building
In an important milestone for the Big Shift, hot water is now flowing through recently laid pipes into six buildings in the Quad District, providing them with heat from a more renewable source.
Quick Summary
As buildings are prepared to use hot water as a heat source, there will be heat and sometimes hot water outages, typically lasting a few days.
The Big Shift crew is working with facility and department managers to determine what measures can be taken to mitigate the impact of this work and minimize shutdowns where possible.
Before these buildings could utilize the hot water, each of their mechanical rooms had to be converted, a process that will be repeated in each of the approximately 30 buildings in the scope of the Big Shift. See the list of buildings and schedule, showing the approximate construction timeframe.
“All these buildings are designed to use steam, so we have to demolish old and build new infrastructure in the mechanical rooms before we can make the switch to hot water,” Alan Suleiman, project manager for the Big Shift, said.
During the conversion process, buildings will lose heating and, in some cases, hot water for a few days. However, the Big Shift team is working to mitigate the impact on work, research and teaching.
“At both the Student Community Center and Silo we installed temporary heating infrastructure that kept domestic hot water available for food service while we demolished the old steam equipment,” Suleiman said.
If temperatures dip down below 50 degrees during heating outages, similar measures will be put in place to provide comfort heat to building occupants. Even where Big Shift crews are able to minimize the outage, there will be some downtime, as short as half a day, as the heating switches over.
Before any work is done, and long before any shutdowns, the Big Shift team will reach out to facility and department managers to share construction dates, impacts and how to best accommodate work being done in the building.
Big Shift crews are working to be as flexible as possible within the constraints of the project. If you have any questions or concerns, check out the FAQ on our building conversions page or contact the team at bigshift@ucdavis.edu.