CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Throughout the summer, many people have been concerned over air conditioning issues at several local schools within Corpus Christi Independent School District.
However, there's a district facility maintenance system that helps to monitor all issues with every system at all 71 school campuses. The system office, located at 1220 Agnes St., serves as the nucleus for energy maintenance, particularly HVAC services.
Through virtual technology, they can control temperatures, fix air and water chillers and hot water boilers.
“Each system has a main homepage and that will give us big key points, like chillers and overall temperatures of the school and that’s where we start," CCISD's Facility Maintenance Coordinator George Dreyer said. "Then, we can drill down to common problems. So we can log these points every minute, every 15 minutes, see what’s its doing after hours.”
The operations team can see maintenance specifics from every school in the district. They can see whether the cooling towers are working consistently or what the system pumps are doing, especially during 100 degree temperatures.
"When you have a heat load like we do now, a lot of people don’t understand that the AC's in this area to handle about 95 degrees, so when you start passing that up, you’re really stressing your system," Dreyer said.
To keep students cool, they’re also utilizing temporary cooler units at campuses like Miller and King High School, as backup for the primary and secondary system. Dreyer said it's costly, but they do not want students to be hot in the classroom.
All operations can be handled from any smart device, even if they’re not at the main hub. Although everyone doesn’t know what happens behind the scenes with maintenance operations, they’re hoping this can help them understand their priority in making sure every campus stays cool.
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