LOWVILLE — Lewis County General Hospital has kicked off a $2.4 million energy-efficiency project that's expected to pay for itself in savings.
"There's about a 12-year payback," said Thomas W. Ferguson Sr., the county-owned hospital's director of facilities management.
And the more energy costs rise, "the more attractive this project is for us," Mr. Ferguson said.
The New York State Energy Research and Development Agency is to contribute about $100,000 toward the project through grant funding and reduced borrowing costs, he said.
Annual debt service payments should be offset by the relative decrease in energy costs, Mr. Ferguson said. "It's really cash neutral," he said.
Along with providing significant cost savings, the project will "make sure we're going to have a highly reliable and highly efficient plant" into the future, Mr. Ferguson said.
The project, expected to take about a year to complete, was initiated last week with asbestos removal in the basement boiler room.
Four oil boilers installed in 1963 — a main one in an upper boiler room and three others in the basement room — will be removed and replaced with two new ones that are more properly sized for the North State Street campus, Mr. Ferguson said.
The facility has been expanded several times since 1963.
Following removal of the old boilers, a 350-ton electric chiller will be installed in the basement boiler room, essentially replacing a 300-ton natural gas unit that was installed in 1972.
While natural gas tends to be cheaper than electricity, the old chiller is only about 60 percent as efficient as the new one will be, Mr. Ferguson said.
The old unit will be retained and used as a backup, giving the hospital "complete redundancy in its air-conditioning system," he said.
And, if natural gas were to become appreciably less expensive than electricity, the old unit could always be used as the main chiller for a time, Mr. Ferguson said. "It's served us very well," he said. "It's very reliable."
The capital project also will replace several cooling towers in a small structure on the hospital's roof that were installed in 1972 with the rest of the air-conditioning system.
A pair of 1,000-gallon hot-water tanks in the basement also will be replaced. Mr. Ferguson said one of the tanks has been out of service since before 1999, when he came to work at the hospital.
The facility's 2,800 light fixtures will be upgraded with new electronic ballasts and energy-efficient bulbs.
Along with the obvious electricity savings, the change will result in less heat being generated by the lights, meaning the air-conditioning system should be taxed less, Mr. Ferguson said. While that also would set up the need for more heating in the winter, the summertime savings should well exceed losses from the colder months, he said.
The facility's computerized energy monitoring system also will be upgraded.
While the current system controls air flow from outdoors based on temperature, the new one also would automatically factor in humidity, Mr. Ferguson said. Any humidity-based adjustments now must be done manually, he said.
