January 12, 2018 - Plumbing & Restrooms
Like many colleges and universities across the country, Texas A&M in College Station, Texas always turned to carbon steel pipe and fittings for their water lines. The facilities team faced high leak rates and dealt with too frequent interruptions to service on campus. “On a normal day, we were losing up to 40-50 gallons per minute,” Reuben Bernal, the supervisor for water distribution at the school says.
About 10 years ago, the school decided to start replacing problem areas with polyethylene pipe, starting off on domestic water and gradually using it on the thermal system. The switch was so successful, essentially all steel pipe on campus has been replaced and new construction projects utilize polyethylene pipe.
While designing the university’s new RELLIS Education and Research Campus, a high-tech, multi-institutional research, testing, and workforce development campus, engineers once again specified polyethylene. ISCO provided 20 and 24-inch high-density polyethylene (HDPE) for chilled water lines and 12-inch PlatinumStripe 1800 PE-RT Pipe manufactured by Performance Pipe for the heating hot water lines.
For the first part of the project, the 12-inch PE-RT was installed with Gilsulate insulation as backfill. For phase two, preinsulated PE-RT was used for the heating hot water piping. PE-RT significantly expands the operation window for poly pipe with pressure ratings up to 180 F. It also allows intermittent operating temperatures up to 203 F.
Texas A&M has become a leader among schools looking for a solution to leaking water systems. They’ve gone from losing 40-50 gallons per minute to only single digits. “You can look at our chart,” Bernal said. “Every morning we get a reading and on campus, right now, it’s at seven gallons per minute on chilled and 3.7 gallons per minute on heat. That’s a huge drop, from what we were to what we are now, that’s a huge change.”
At the end of the day, the sole job of the water distribution crew is to make sure that they keep interruption to students and faculty to a bare minimum. “If they don’t notice us, we’re doing our job right,” Bernal explained. “If we’re out here having to cut service off to make repairs and they’re out for a few days or an hour or 15 minutes, that’s a big thing.” With PE-RT and HDPE, they have the benefit of a leak-free system that won’t corrode in the ground.
