Malta Elementary's new boiler steams forward

The Malta School Board was updated on the new boiler that will be installed at the elementary school this summer as part of their regular board meeting last week as Jay Cederberg, of Mechanical Technologies, said that his company is about 90-percent done with the engineering portion of the proposed project.

Cederberg brought the board a set of drawings to show which direction the project is headed. He said the initial plan to replace the boiler, which was installed in the school in the 1950’s, called for two smaller boilers, one a Patterson-Kelley Boiler, the same make as the boilers in the high school.

“The idea was to have the same type of boilers in all of your schools,” he said. “But the problem with those boilers is that they have very small water passages and the piping under the floor in the elementary school is 50-years old and has a lot of stuff in it.”

He said that what will be installed is a firetube boiler in which the water surrounds the firetube which leads to larger passages of water.

He said that the two plumbing contractors currently being talked to about submitting bids for the job – Dale Plumbing & Heating, based in Glasgow, and Star Service out of Billings – are very familiar with the firetube type of boilers.

“I’m open to suggestions of other plumbing contactors if you guys have any ideas of the local contractors that might be able to do this type of work and get it done this summer,” Cederberg added.

Cederberg said that there isn’t much electrical work to be done on the project, but said that most likely a new electrical panel would need to be installed to plug pumps into circuits which the current panels don’t have space for. He said that there would be two or three bids put in on the electrical work.

The estimated budget for the project is $95,000 – which includes the new boilers and re-piping of the boiler room, but is dependent on the plumbing bids.

“That way we would be able to modify or extend onto the boiler system in the event that the underfloor piping in the elementary school fails,” Cederberg said. “We did a test on that underfloor piping about a month ago and determined it would hold pressure at the boiler pressures, but not much above that. We are pretty confident that those pipes are holding underneath the floor, but again, that piping is 60 years old and we are thinking that those pipes are going to fail before the new boilers do.”

He said that the new boiler will be tied into the boiler at the south end of the school in a possible later phase of the project. Once the boiler is installed, Cederberg said that, from his experience, the current boiler runs at an efficiency range of 62-to-77 percent and that the new boiler would be much more effective, running at 95-to-97 efficiency range.

Cederberg said that he believed that if all goes well the project will begin by the end of June and most of the work would be finished before the first day of school.

School Board trustee R.J. Tollefson asked to see an itemized spreadsheet on the cost of the project and Cederberg said that he would provide the board with a detailed list.

Malta School’s Superintendent Kris Kuehn said that there is a possibility of a special school board meeting to approve the work before construction begins.

Mechanical Technologies is a based out of Billings Montana.