First United Methodist Church of Pittsburgh Capital Campaign

Renovation Plan is Delayed to Address Issues Such as Designing and Engineering the Sanctuary's New Heating System

by David Hounshell, Member, Building Committee

Have you ever sat in the Sanctuary during the dead of winter and wondered why the heating system was so quiet that you were barely aware of it? I know that I certainly have. Sometimes I can hear a rattle in one of the ducts that convey hot air out the ends of the pews, but for the most part the system is remarkably quiet.

Our previous home in Delaware had a forced-air heating system that sometimes drove us nuts when we were watching a movie on our television or trying to get our youngest child to go to sleep for the night. When we moved to Pittsburgh, I was delighted by how quiet the old natural-flow hot water heating system of our new home was. A few years later, we decided to install two high-efficiency boilers to replace our old ones as a way of saving on our gas bills. The new boilers cut the monthly heating bills down okay, but the circulation pumps that help make the system thermally efficient remind me of that furnace of our Delaware house: aggravatingly noisy and very distracting!!

One of the big issues that the Building Committee, RSSC Architecture, and Tower Engineering (our engineering consultants for the electrical, plumbing, and heating, ventilating, and air condition system) have been facing as we settle on the details of the new heating system for Sanctuary has been precisely the problem of trying to ensure that the new high-efficiency system doesn’t come at a cost of any increased noise from the system. One would think that in this day and age—it being the Twenty-First Century after all!—that there wouldn’t be any such problems, but that just isn’t so. Modern air handlers move heated or chilled air much, much faster than the rate at which our current fan moves the air, and therefore they can have real problems with noise.

Recently, in trying to address the question of what size and brand of “air handler” (aka “fan”) would replace our existing, 115-year old air handler and determining if it would be quiet, we decided to take a much closer look at what made our fan so quiet. The three accompanying photographs document the motor that turns the fan, the belting system that runs from the motor to the fan pulley, and the fan housing (inside of which turns a big 90-inch steel fan that pulls cold air through a heat exchanger and pushes the heated air out through a massive air duct toward all those end-of-pew registers in the Sanctuary).

A close inspection of our unit revealed a manufacturer’s plate that had been painted over several times: Buffalo Forge Company, Buffalo, NY. A quick Google search revealed two things: The company that made the fan in 1893 is still in business under the name Howden Buffalo, Inc., and the University of California Library System had scanned and put online a 500-page catalogue of the company’s products dating to 1896, only a few years after First Church’s system was installed!

A close reading of the contents of the trade catalogue revealed something even more remarkable: a photograph of our church building on page 372 with the additional information that not only did Buffalo Forge Company supply our fan in 1893, but it designed, manufactured, and installed the entire heating system for the original building.

Additional study of the 1896 catalogue, which is filled with design data and specifications on all of the company’s products, has given us data on the capacity (in cubic feet per minute—CFM) of our fan at the speed it is currently rotated, the velocity of the air leaving the fan for the big supply ducts, and even the original cost of the fan (a whopping $300). These data are being used by the engineers at Tower and by a HVAC contractor in making revisions to the design and cost estimates of the new heating system.

Furthermore, the 1896 catalogue contains a page on church heating systems that not only explains the Buffalo Forge Company’s design and engineering philosophy at the time First Church was built but that conforms pretty much exactly to the criteria that our own Building Committee’s Chair Fred Watts had laid out again and again as we reviewed Tower Engineering’s design and specifications. That page from 1896 is also reproduced here.

Three final points: First, as of the time I write, we are hopeful that Howden Buffalo is still in possession of all the design drawings and specifications of the complete heating system that it installed here in the mid-1890s. These drawings would materially aid Tower Engineering’s work and eliminate some real sources of uncertainty about the new system they are proposing. Second, provided that Howden Buffalo is willing to stand behind its 1893 product for another half-century or so (whether the fan is rebuilt or not) there is a remote possibility of Tower’s incorporating the fan into the revised design to ensure that the new heating system will be as quiet or quieter than the existing system. Third, the inspection of Buffalo Forge’s 1896 catalogue also revealed that the company designed, manufactured, and installed our Northside sister church’s (Calvary’s) original heating system, as is conveyed in a fine photograph. Not only did the two churches have matching Tiffany windows when they were built; they also had matching heating systems!

This little story about the design of our new Sanctuary heating system is only one of the many adventures that the Building Committee has been having. More such stories will appear as they are developed more fully. It is hoped that readers will understand a bit better why we have not reached closure on the full scope (and cost) of the Phase One project as fast and as smoothly as we had hoped.