A Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) crew of roughly a dozen men responsible for keeping Boise State’s campus warm, cold and dry at all the right times have spent their entire careers servicing the same three steam boilers.
Beneath the iconic smokestack rising from the steam boiler building behind the Liberal Arts building, classrooms and offices across campus received heating from those three boilers for 59 years. Barbara Beagles, the executive director of facilities at Boise State, said that’s roughly twice as long as their predicted service life.
The boilers are being replaced as part of the capital renewal program, a $90 million dollar grant from the state of Idaho given to Boise State to catch up on maintenance the university couldn’t previously afford to perform, like replacing massive steam boilers.
The capital renewal program is expected to run until 2028 and consists of about 64 projects split between two phases. Projects range from upgraded lights to new concrete on sidewalks in the Quad.
“The state of Idaho had a surplus of money and they decided to use that surplus and spread it out amongst all of the state agencies to basically work on ‘deferred maintenance’ projects,” said Beagles.
Beagles said she “hates” the term “deferred maintenance” as it implies workers simply chose not to do the maintenance in the past, when really, they were financially unable to.
“It’s deferred capital,” said Beagles. “If we weren’t doing our maintenance, these [boilers] would have died long before now.”
The boilers supply heat across Boise State’s campus through nearly a mile of tunnels — tunnels the HVAC crew sometimes must traverse to perform necessary maintenance. The tunnels are too short for a grown adult to stand up in and are mostly occupied by the massive steam pipes.
Facilities HVAC Foreman Mike Sherwood described the ordeal.
“There’s times where you’re crawling through and picture opening that small drawer,” Sherwood said as he pointed at a small tool drawer in the HVAC shop.
“That’s the space you get to move through, it’s extremely confined and uncomfortable. You’re losing skin to go through,” he said.
Sherwood said that with the many upgrades the capital renewal program is bringing, HVAC technicians won’t have to slither through confined tunnels anymore. Rather, they’ll be able to access the pipes with a greater number of maintenance hatches than before.
Those maintenance hatches will be installed when vast swaths of concrete making up the Quad’s walkway are torn up, which means that by the end of the program in 2028, students’ shoes will be treading fresh concrete.
Brian Emtman leads a group of about 30 people who cover HVAC, electrical, plumbing, energy management, facilities engineering, building automation and geographic information systems. Emtman provided additional details of the capital renewal program.
“[Facilities] has been working to identify and scope the projects that would be beneficial to campus from the facilities perspective. There are other groups on campus, like the auxiliaries, that have been reached out to as well,” said Emtman.
Auxiliaries are campus facilities that are not directly managed by the university and are responsible for their own maintenance. This includes Residence Life’s dorm buildings, the Morrison Center and athletics facilities, among others.
“They’re [auxiliaries] also feeding projects into the capital renewal effort, essentially identifying things that we feel would be impactful to campus that would be priorities for the capital renewal funding,” said Emtman.
He said the program includes many smaller behind-the-scenes changes that students will never notice.
“[We’re going] to see upgrades to some buildings’ plumbing infrastructure: old galvanized piping that’s outdated being replaced with newer technology to reduce the risk of leaks. We’ll be upgrading electrical infrastructure in a lot of buildings,” Emtman said.
While the capital renewal project will take a number of years to complete and will involve some invasive construction and maintenance, the end product is what Boise State Facilities professionals hope will mean a smoother-operating campus where maintenance is less frequent.
