[Greenbuilding] [BULK] Re: [BULK] green built hospitals?

[Lawrence Lile]

Chris Sez:
>The regional hospital here has a strange gizmo outside that I don't 
really know what its' purpose might be. It's a structure built of 
hundreds, if not thousands, of 4' cedar 1x4 boards, arranged something 
like the slats in venetian blinds. Rows of these are contained in the 
open air structure, and water is constantly being drip-irrigated on to 
it. A lot of water.
 Sometimes you can hear a fan pulling air through it, 

Multiple choice answer:  Pick one.

1.  It is a device for growing legionaire's disease. 

2. It is a device for testing the moisture tolerance of cedar wood.

3. It is a device for adding moisture to the already humidity-choked
summertime air. 

4. It is a device for cooling off volumes of water by evaporating some
of it. 

Got an answer yet?  The right answer is:  all of the above!  The thing
is a cooling tower, and it is cooling off water that goes to chillers
somewhere in the bowels of the building.  Water will enter the tower at
maybe 95F, and cool off the maybe 85F by evaporating some, rejecting its
heat in the process, and return to the chiller in the basement.
Ultimately it is the major way heat is rejected from the building.  

If the cooling tower is from the 1960's, they could probably save a
bundle of cash by replacing it with a modern tower with a variable fan
and a variable pump.  And yes, this is the very type of machine that
probably grew the first known batch of legionaires disease.  

--Lawrence