In the heat of the upcoming spring and summer months, students will enjoy more reliable air conditioning while the university saves money.

The university is installing new air conditioning chillers in several residence halls and repiping the old chiller in the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union to create more efficient and reliable air conditioning in the buildings.

Orange fencing still surrounds several construction sites near the north tower of Carman Hall and the east side of Thomas and Andrew Halls where workers dug almost 13 feet into the ground to install the new air conditioning chillers, Gary Reed, utilities manger, said.

The same work is being done at Stevenson Hall; however, workers did not have to rip apart the ground to install a new chiller. Instead, Reed said they used an existing underground ramp to access the mechanical room and install the new chiller.

The new chillers and rerouted water pipes are part of Eastern’s energy conservation project, which the university contracted Honeywell, Co. to complete. The chillers are part of the conservation project as well as other changes that were done over winter break on campus such as the installation of low flow toilets, showers and faucets and energy efficient lighting.

The energy conservation contract is expected to save the university $10.8 million over a ten year period or Honeywell will pay the difference.

Reed said the new chillers are more energy efficient because they run on electricity as opposed to the old chillers that ran on steam and burned natural gas.

The chillers were “past their life cycle and needed to be replaced,” Carol Strode, interim director of the Physical Plant, said Thursday. “They just were not as efficient as they could be.”

Reed said the new chillers were installed because the original 35-year-old machines were unreliable and prone to break downs.

In addition, he said the new chillers will use less energy and, therefore, limit utility costs.

“Energy costs are being managed well and this will be more reliable,” he said. Reed said he hopes the air conditioning will be “up and running” in the updated buildings by early May. Although the chillers are installed, workers need to finish installing pipes and hooking electronics to the chiller and the fencing will stay up until the ground starts to grow grass.

As another part of the air conditioning project, the Union area was excavated over winter break to join the building’s air conditioner to the existing chilled water loop on the north side of campus.

The connection is another effort to make cooling in the Union more efficient and reliable. With the new pipes connected, the university will no longer have to run the air conditioning in all the buildings at once. The chilled water loop will be able to cool one building at a time, so no single chiller will have to bare the burden of cooling several other buildings.