This is Awesome!!!!!

This is so awesome!!!!!
And there is really no other word for it...

I am really excited to tell you about our newest project. Our camp - God's camp - is going start saving a ton of money... EVERY year! Do you how that is going to happen?........

With a wood burner which will have the capacity to heat up to six buildings: the dining hall, Alpine Bathhouse, and Staff Cabins 7-10.

A wood burner to purchase, costs $9,200, but will pay itself off in only 1.5 - 2 years. Learn more here It not only will provide heat, but also hot water to the buildings it is connected to.

You may say, "That's cool... but how are you going to come up with $9,200?" That's the best part! We just got a check for $9,200 from an awesome, and very, very faithful donor! Is that cool, or what? I'm not sure cool quite expresses our intense gratitude. It's incredible! No, awesome!

We start prep work on Monday the 17th. First we'll start on staff cabins 7-10, and then the Dining Hall. And move from there. The dream is that as this unit pays itself off we might even be able to get another one and introduce it to other parts of camp and save even more money.

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We are pumped... join us!


Want to see other great stuff happening at Covenant Heights Summer Camp and Retreat Center? Check out the Covenant Heights Blog at www.CovenantHeights.BlogSpot.com or go to www.CovenantHeights.org

Saving Money for More Ministry

Mike, our Maintenance Director, has been working diligently on saving Covenant Heights Camp money through energy efficiency and conservation in what is being called the Cut 90% Do More Project (Learn more, click the "About" tab above). These projects have the ultimate goal of cutting our energy costs by 90% which would free up significant funds for more "direct" ministry. I call it direct ministry here, because in reality, as we all know, you can't do ministry without heat, lights, running water, and other such necessities. That reality, though, is not stopping us from working to be more efficient and better stewards of what we have been given!

With that said, we want to celebrate a few of our volunteers who have given many hours and much expertise to camp in order to switch out all of our lighting ballasts. (Don't know what a ballast is? I didn't. It's a device intended to limit the amount of current in an electric circuit. A familiar and widely used example is the inductive ballast used in fluorescent lamps, to limit the current through the tube.)

This specific project was to switch all of the T12 ballasts on camp to T8 ballasts. This change alone will result in 43% savings on what we spend on lighting. We had a lot of people volunteering their time to help with project. Three that deserve special recognition are Arlie Lease, Jim Ramsey, and Jack Arnold who led the task of switching out 162 ballasts and 356 bulbs!

Thank you!

Want to Volunteer? Email Mike - Mike@CovenantHeights.org

Want to Invest? Donate Here.

Sealing it all up

In Longs Peak today we put spray foam on the walls in the crawl space. Now we have a R-16-20 insulation and an airtight seal. We will save money and Jesse and his family can stay warmer!!

Here is a cool link to see someone using it. Spray Foam in use

This is the best insulation for us to use, and we need a lot more!! *hint hint* We have a lot of work in the Dining Hall, Cabins 7 & 8, and Autumn still to do! This link will take you directly to the correct page if you would like to donate some!

Here is Jordan in action!

Excellent insulation, but you don't want to get it on you!

A visual example

I took a lot of pictures of all the buildings on camp with a thermal camera to see where the heat loss was. Black means cold (low heat loss) and white means warm (high heat loss). The first two are of Longs Peak, where you can see that the new window on left is black (not letting the inside heat escape) but the window on the right is white (the inside heat pouring out!). See what a big difference the new windows make?

 

                                         The picture above is the water treatment plant.
                                                      The picture below is the entry of Winter.

New window in Longs

We got a new window in Longs Peak! Now 2 out of 4 that need to be replaced are done.

Longs Peak Sealing

Jordan got the last spot on Longs Peak cabin sealed up! Now we will not have the problem of animals getting under it, or the wind blowing under it and causing it to be uncomfortable in the cabin We will also see a savings in the cost of heating.

BayWeb in Woman's side of bathhouse

Jordan put BayWeb in the woman's side of the bathhouse, so we can monitor it. Now we have it on both sides. We can save 25% or more on our heating for this building!

We are almost there!!!

We only have 13 more ballasts to go until camp is completely converted from T12 to T8. The new ballasts save us 43% on our lighting bill. Volunteers Jim and Jack are finishing it up!!!

Wire clean up and sealing on south side

At Longs Peak we cleaned under the cabin. The wires under there looked like noodles, so we are stapling it all up.
We finished all the brick and morter on the south side, so now it is all sealed up!

Foundation Work, Continued...

Today we cleaned out more debris from below Longs Peak, and put up boards to fill with concrete for the footer. We also filled in some of the concrete.

Crawl Space Clean-out

Today we cleaned out underneath Longs Peak cabin to prepare for the foundation work. It was really, really nasty under there. We got a lot of debris out, including trash and more than a few dead critters. Sadly for us, we get to do this a couple more times, since we only got 1/3 of it done today... 

Foundation Work

Today we were digging out the foundation of Longs Peak. This is one of the staff houses where we are going to do some work this week.

This building, which is part old log cabin and part newer addition, is very drafty in the original section. To help with this, we are putting in new double pane windows and filling in the space below the outer walls. The first step is digging trenches, which will then be filled with concrete and rebar. Above that, we will stack these cinder blocks donated to us by High Peak camp.

Mike

New Insulation

It have a R-40 now in it, where before it was a R-0 - R-19. The industry standard for attic insulation is R-38... clearly this was a badly needed change!

Windows

MMAPers are putting seven new windows in Aspen.

Attic venting

There were old heater roof stacks coming out of the roof of Columbine. Our pesty chipmunks were using them as their front door, so the MMAPers took them out and replaced them with proper venting.

New Windows (new to us)

We got 30 used windows from a retirement home in Denver. The MMAP (Mobile Missionary Assistant Program) volunteers have been working this week putting ten of the windows in at Columbine. Columbine is an office on the left side, a meeting room in the middle, and summer staff housing on the right. We will see a big savings in electricity this winter with the new windows!

Pinecones!

The attic of Columbine has tons of pinecones in it!

The ground squirrels for years have been going into the crawl space and up in the walls and into the attic.

We have had two guys getting all the pinecones out for the last four days. They work up there for two hours in the AM before it gets too hot up there, shop-vacuuming all the debris.

Ductwork and Insulation

We fixed the cold air intake and insulated the attic in Autumn. The cold air intake was all disconnected and was pouring in the warm air from inside the building up into the attic. We also started to insulate the roof. This should fix the ice build-up.

BayWeb

We installed BayWeb in Autumn, and ordered ones for Winter and Cedar. A big thanks to Pat and Patsy for donating the money to buy them! Each BayWeb will save camp $300 a year. It gives the administrator (me) control over the heat and monitors the temperature remotely via the internet. One of our biggest problems in the past during the cold season has been pipes freezing. Our old heating systems sometimes fail, and in the past if we didn't have a specific reason to go into a lodge we wouldn't notice it was cold until I saw our water storage tanks getting emptied faster than we could possibly be using the water. That used to be how we would discover the building had gotten so cold that the water - or even worse, sewage - pipes had frozen. With BayWeb installed in each lodge, I have it programmed to send me an email alert if the temperature goes above or below the parameters I have set for each one. I can change the alarm parameters for when people are in the lodges, which helps me catch a heater problem before it gets cold enough to disturb the guests. It also allows me to make sure the heaters don't get turned up ridiculously high. :) Learn more at BayWeb.com

Well that explains a lot...

We found the four bathroom fans in Autumn had no piping to outside, and were covered with insulation. Not only is this just gross, but it was heating up the attic space, causing roof damage by melting ice right into the attic! Also not so good for the bathrooms...

Autumn Attic

We got into the attic in Autumn and found three disconnected air vents, two squished air vents, and a disconnected air return. The vents had little or no insulation around them.

The Problem...

We are starting with Autumn first. The ice build-up is damaging the roof and causing water damage inside because of poor attic insulation.  

To start this Cut 90% Project we are starting with Air leaks, insulating, Putting in BayWeb,and light timers.  We are going to Start at Autumn Lodge.