Mennonite Weekly Review

NORTH NEWTON, Kan. — The open space in the center of campus isn’t the only “green” at Bethel College these days.

Les Goerzen, left, and Roger Reimer, right, take a look at Adam Akers’ BlackBerry, one of the computers that can monitor and control energy usage in almost any building on the Bethel College campus thanks to an energy management system. — Photo by Melanie Zuercher

It’s just more visible than the efforts of three Bethel staff, which over the past several years have reduced water and energy consumption, increased responsible use of both financial and natural resources and now begun to pay significant dividends.

Sometimes the solution to a large problem like an institution’s energy consumption is “to be aggressive in targeting small [things],” said Bethel maintenance worker Roger Reimer.

Since he began his position at Bethel a little over a year ago, he has spent the bulk of his time doing just that, along with maintenance coworker Adam Akers and Les Goerzen, director of Bethel’s physical plant.

“Small things” include converting all regular incandescent bulb lighting to compact fluorescent bulbs and, in the Memorial Hall and Thresher gyms, HID lamps to high-efficiency, high-output T5 fixtures; putting in occupancy sensors for several areas on campus, such as the library’s basement stacks, to keep lights turned off when no one is present; and installing hardware — and sometimes thousands of feet of wiring — to bring more of the campus buildings online with a computerized energy management system first deployed in 1985.

“It’s like having a computer at home,” Akers said. “As time goes on, you begin to figure out how to use more and more of its capabilities.”

The library required some custom design. Because of the particular kind of light switches in the stacks, there was no commercial product available to put them on an occupancy sensor. So Reimer and Akers built it themselves.

They also developed a mechanism for shutting off the water in Goering Hall, home of the athletics department, where the sump pump was consistently and inexplicably turning off, causing much water waste and several floods in the basement.

“If the sump pump quits working, even for a second, the water to the whole building shuts off for 24 hours,” Akers said. “That way, we know something happened and we can check it out. I don’t think there’s another building in Newton with that capability.”

They also had to get creative in Memorial Hall. On Saturday afternoons in winter, the basketball coaches, whose offices are in Mem Hall, need to come in ahead of evening games, which used to mean firing up the boiler in the heat plant just for two or three offices.