The ecological movement “BIOM”, with the support of the “School Project for Resource and Energy Use” (SPARE, Norway), has long attracted the attention of the population, business structures, and local and state authorities to the possibility of implementing initiatives in the field of energy conservation. Energy-saving measures help improve the quality of life for the population. Ecologists believe that this way, it will be possible to improve the social situation of residents in villages and cities and to promote environmental protection and public health. The topic of energy conservation is particularly relevant for schools and preschool institutions, which have very limited funding.
According to T. B. Isakova, the director of the Department of Disease Prevention and State Sanitary and Epidemiological Surveillance of the Ministry of Health of the Kyrgyz Republic, out of 2204 schools in the country, of which 269 are state-owned, 60 are privately owned, and 1875 are municipal, with a total of over 1 million students, 46% of general education schools across the republic continue to operate in adapted buildings, and 30% of schools do not have centralized water supply. Only 183 schools in the republic are covered by central heating, 908 schools use electric heating, 24 use gas, 560 use solid fuels, 462 schools rely on stove heating, and 3.8% of schools have mixed heating. During the period of independence, almost everywhere heating systems have not been repaired, resulting in even insulation of external walls and window openings not saving students and teachers from the cold in classrooms. This situation is also present in the Baranov Lyceum in the village of Novopokrovka, Chui region. According to its director, Farida Akhmetovna Nizamutdinova, the school was put into operation in 1967. Over the years, repairs have been made repeatedly, resulting in a decrease in heating capacity due to the removal of one of the three heating boilers. Instead of replacing the slagged heating devices over time, they were simply removed. As a result, it is impossible to achieve the standard temperature in the school premises. In cold weather, temperatures in some classrooms drop to +11 degrees Celsius. There is also a significant temperature variation on the surfaces of the walls in the school premises. Therefore, simply replacing or insulating the windows is unlikely to save the situation with heating. “This summer, parents of students independently replaced old, dried-up window frames in the primary school. If there is no heat in the room, what heat will the windows retain?” – wonders the director. Farida Akhmetova also mentioned that the school is heated by a coal boiler located 8 meters from the main building. There, “Spectr” type boilers are installed, each with a capacity of 140 kW. The boilers are supplied with cold water. One boiler operates, the other is a backup. The school is allocated 20 tons of coal annually, but due to the outdated and imperfect heating system, this coal is spent “wasted.”
The conclusion is obvious: it is time to overhaul the school’s heating system. However, the situation is complicated by the fact that all technical documentation for the heating network and the distribution system has long been lost. And no one has created documentation for the actual heating system. “To ‘warm’ the school, it is necessary to eliminate the cause of the cold. This cannot be done without restoring the heating scheme,” says expert Taranenko, “Another problem is that when the boiler room is turned on, the only stoker for the entire school has to run around constantly draining water from the heating system. The pressure in the slagged devices rises very quickly, and one has to constantly fear that the ‘system will burst.’ One can continue to regulate the pressure with valves and shutoff devices, install a control valve, or one can put in 4 pumps.” “For now, a small modernization is allowing us to avoid a critical situation: the ventilation speed has been increased and the airiness of the heating system has been reduced. Nevertheless, uneven heating of the heating devices is observed. The devices installed in niches under windows without a gap to the outside environment ‘give off’ heat to the street through the outer wall. Also, the heat carrier does not reach the upper part of the radiator,” says engineer Vladimir Ryzhkov, “First, the actual heating scheme needs to be restored in the form of drawings, and then it must be modernized. But this is a large and very costly job requiring the involvement of highly qualified thermal engineers.” “Currently, the lyceum cannot independently invest such money in modernizing the heating system,” explains the director, “Modernizing the heating system will cost about 200,000 soms. This is a huge amount for us, even though we can find funds through providing additional educational services.” The problem drew in the ED “BIOM.” Thanks to the support of the “Energy Efficiency for a Stable Future” project of the “Clean Energy” program, an assessment of the school’s heating network was conducted, for which specialized experts were invited. An engineer-designer had to be brought to the school, considering the complexity of the task. “The Novopokrovka School named after Baranov consists of 2 buildings. The older building is a 2-story school with an external volume of 13,077 m³ and a height of 9m, and a standalone one-story building for the younger (primary) school with an external volume of 6,710 m²,”
“We had to break open the floors and step by step restore the heating scheme,” says expert Vladimir Ryzhkov, “Heating the classrooms, corridors, service, and functional rooms is carried out by several separate circuits welded into the main heating pipeline. Valves are installed on the supply and return branches of the heating pipeline in the boiler room, on the 1st floor of the senior school, and at the entrance and exit to the primary school building. There are valves on 3 out of 4 branches for supplying the heat carrier to the 2nd floor, on the supply and return branch in the primary school, as well as on common drains of the heat carrier from the system at a height of -2.5m. The heating system is a one-pipe loop network, and the consumption system is distributed through homemade registers and cast iron radiators of type M-140. This is a very large and responsible job.”
Accordingly, it should also be compensated. ED “BIOM” provided substantial support to the school in the form of co-financing the preparation of documentation, which amounted to 20,000 soms (out of a total of 32,000 soms). “The purpose of the work on the school is to raise the temperature in the premises to the normative level,” says project coordinator for “Energy Efficiency for a Stable Future” Natalia Bogatova, “The work includes, in the first stage, restoring the schematic representation of the actual existing scheme of the boiler room, heating network, and heat consumption system of the school.” Currently, specialists have already presented descriptions of the principal schemes of distribution in the boiler room, 1st and 2nd floors of the senior school, primary school, and provided photographs of the distribution in the boiler room.
Text and photo: Irina Bayramukova
