Heating and Cooling

“How was your house heated when you were a child?”

The retreat leader asked us this question as a way for us to get to know each other. Around the circle so many different answers, and sweet childhood memories.  Vivid descriptions of furnaces and fires and radiators and space heaters and different climates and comforts.

My story was about a mysterious pipe valve thing in the side yard.  How we had to be careful on the lawn, when we played badminton after dinner on summer nights, not to trip on this metal protuberance.  How once or twice a year a big heating and oil truck parked on our street and unrolled a massive hose and clamped it onto this valve and pumped something mysterious, we couldn’t see it, smelled it a bit, down into the ground.   There was a tank down there?  Some kind of oil under the lawn and the badminton net?  That’s what kept us warm in cold New York winters, just push the lever on the wall thermostat and whoosh, warmth.

I wrote last week about my two favorite big local public buildings, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Community Hospital, and how they had some similarities that I found intriguing. 

In both places we mostly experience the public side, waiting rooms and exhibit windows.  But I’m always curious about the behind the scenes stuff, infrastructure, pipes and furnaces, how air and water get moved around.  Like my childhood oil tank hidden under the lawn, the engineering of water and heat and power is somewhat mysterious.

Hospitals want to assure us they are clean and healthy, so pipes and vents are hidden away.  Don’t worry about how we convey power or waste – we’ve got you covered.  Literally, covered.  White walls and neat corners and perfectly sealed ceiling tiles.

The Aquarium, on the other hand, uses the “show it all” style of infrastructure, like the Pompidou Centre in Paris.  Just look up and you see all the pipes and wiring and vents, exposed in the ceiling, not hidden away.

This makes it easier for us Aquarium volunteers to explain the complicated plumbing system, how we bring all the water for the exhibit tanks in from the bay.  Since we filter it during the day for more water clarity, and let it in unfiltered at night for more nutrients and naturalness for the animals and plants, you can look up and see two different sets of pipes, marked RSW, raw sea water, FSW, filtered sea water.

If the Hospital wants to assure us that they’ve got us covered, all is clean and careful, the Aquarium wants to take us inside, unveil the mysteries of the deep that we usually can’t see.  I have been to other Aquariums that were more like museums (or hospitals,) more pristine aesthetics than open source science.  Perhaps it is because it was tech genius David Packard and his family who started our Aquarium, that there is a deliberate exhibit celebration of the delights of engineering as well as the delights of marine biology.

Another way to describe this difference is that while the Hospital’s goal is healthy people, the Aquarium’s is healthy oceans.  So the Aquarium doesn’t just show us pretty fish, it tries to educate us on how to keep the ocean healthy for more pretty fish.  So we also have exhibits on plastics and pollution and climate change.  These are not all pretty pristine exhibits. 

And the Aquarium tries to reduce its own energy use, not only to save money, but to show the harmful effect that burning fossil fuels has on ocean health. 

For instance, the water temperature in the exhibits.  The Aquarium saves money, and the ocean, by turning off the furnace and using instead the hot air and body heat we visitors provide as the sole heating source for the water in the Open Sea Exhibit. 

The water in the tanks for coastal animals comes right in from the bay, same temperature.  The kelp forest exhibit and other tanks of animals and plants that live right along the coast, they like that 50 degree water from our cold coast California current.  But open ocean animals, hammerheads and tuna and sunfish and turtles, who live fifty miles offshore, they are used to water that is more than ten degrees warmer, low 60’s.  These open ocean animals live in the million gallon tank.  How to heat that water up over ten degrees?  What would that heating bill be? 

Well, nothing, it turns out.  The Aquarium engineers figured out a heat transfer system that takes the great gift our visitors bring it - hot air - and uses it to warm up that water. (Don’t ask me for more detail, I don’t quite get it, something to do with coils, turning the heat of 2 million visitors into heat energy, but I’m assured that’s how they do it.)

Hospitals want to save money also of course (or make it) and our Hospital also touts its energy saving lights, and asks you in the bathrooms to conserve water.  But conservation is not the main goal – healing is, so they can’t really turn off the heat. 

A theme in these columns is how our bodies are like buildings, or buildings are like our bodies.  A few lessons we might learn from these comparisons:

-Our own body infrastructure is mostly hidden.  We are discouraged from too much explicit talk about our own physical  plumbing and pipes.  We follow the Hospital design model more than the Aquarium.  But I think we might all be healthier if we talked more about our inward parts, reduced some of the taboos about “potty talk.”

-If health and healing is all our goals – big institutions and little bodies, we could probably do well to expose and reveal more, rather than hide behind perfect walls.

-Like big buildings we could all try to reduce our excess consumption.  

-And we might try turning some of our excessive hot air into something constructive, like heat for those who really need it.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter