Saving the environment is a noble goal, and the University of Northern Colorado has been taking steps toward that end. But how have those steps been affecting the students living on campus?
For several years, the university has been collaborating with McKinstry consulting to make on-campus operations more efficient; this has lowered energy and water costs for the university, and even won them an award from Excel Energy for their efforts.
But the university has also pushed a lot of the cost back onto students, whether directly or indirectly. New students are encouraged to purchase energy-saving appliances and fixtures on their own dime, while at the same time being charged fees and having services denied. On every student’s bill, there’s a $10 charge that goes towards the Student LEAF program. There’s no way to opt out of this fee, and while $10 isn’t much, when you’re paying it with student loans, it adds up.
But most students feel this pressure in a much tenderer place: the shower. Daevon Robinson, a resident in Wiebking Hall, says that, “The showers would probably be my biggest complaint, the showerheads are just leaky and spray everywhere.” The water pressure leaves much to be desired, the pipes leak all over the floors, and there’s no good way to consistently control water temperature. If you’re the first person to take a shower on a particular day, the water can take up to 10 minutes to warm up to a temperature above hypothermic. The dials and nozzles in each stall give residents the illusion of control, but anytime anyone uses a sink, toilet, or other shower, no matter where they are in the building, temperatures turn scalding. There is no predictability in showering.
One cause is the retrofitting the university has done to its old systems. Since the founding of the university, but more importantly, the building of the residence halls, water heating has been centralized. Not centralized within each building, however. No, each building on the university's Central Campus has its water heated in the basement of Tobey-Kendall hall. This superheated water is sent to each building by pipes hidden in the school’s many steam tunnels, where it’s taken to wherever there’s demand. This explains long wait times and the mechanisms through which water gets places, but it still makes the residence halls much more difficult to live in than necessary.
It’s not just the water that’s heated centrally, however. All heating and air conditioning are also taken care of at specific heating areas and chiller plants. This reduces cost for the university by using systems already in place, but it also creates a standardized HVAC system across campus. Practically, this means that it’s very time consuming to change over from heating to cooling. Situations like the one this April, with a 40 degree difference between high temperatures in a 24-hour period, create a sticky situation for those in charge of building temperatures.
“I understand it’s hard for them to heat up an entire building in a day or cool down an entire building in a day,” Daevon says. Students are demanding full blast air conditioning on one day, and the hottest fires the building can manage the next.
The university is caught between the demands of students, the cost-cutting requirements of the budget, and the realities of a campus that’s 123 years old. It’s doing the best it can with what it has, but it’s also taking what it doesn't to reach that end.
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