Camanche Community School District

Facility Renovations & HVAC Upgrade | Camanche, IA

When the Camanche Community School District conducted a complete review of their facilities, one of the critical issues identified was the need to upgrade the Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems at their middle and elementary school buildings. Almost all the HVAC equipment was installed during the original construction of those buildings and the subsequent additions. This equipment was, in general, in poor condition and past its normal serviceable lifetime.

The overall project combined several new additions at the middle school with the complete retrofit of the HVAC systems at both schools. During the design, West Plains Engineering kept its focus not merely on equipment replacement but also on maximum energy efficiency. The systems for both buildings selected were ground-source heat pumps. Some of the energy efficiency concepts integrated into this design were energy recovery ventilators for conditioning of all outside air intakes, variable speed drives on all HVAC pumps and low-pressure piping design.

The individual ground source heat pumps were two-stage heat units with ECM motors and only the highest efficiency commercially available category of these were allowed to be bid for this project. To allow the district to monitor the performance of this system, the Building Automation System (BAS) was designed to data-log all energy used specifically by the HVAC systems.