In 2008, the school began to retro fit the main floor men’s room. The completion of this project will include two, state of art, Kohler waterless urinals. The maintenance of waterless urinals is also reduced due to elimination of the need for odor control wafers. Waterless urinal odors are controlled with a vegetable oil based produce which only needs to be replace once every two to four weeks and does not require human contact. The bathroom also houses one Kohler 1.25 gallons per flush toilets. These toilets use 22% less than today’s current standard 1.6 gpf. Also installed are 2 Kohler battery powered, motion activated faucets which will dispense water via infrared sensors.

Total water saving for the above mentioned fixtures will save 90,000 gallons of water per year. Not only are we saving on water, but that is 90,000 gallons of water not pumped into the school’s septic system.

Also installed is a motion activated, high speed Dyson hand dryer. This dryer saves the school approximately $4,800 in paper towels each year.

This project was a hands-on learning activity for our students as the majority of the refitting work was done by our construction shops. This bathroom will also be an energy efficient showcase to the public. All fixtures were generously donated to the school from Kohler.

In addition to water concervation, we have re-lamped the entire building with fluorescent lighting at a cost of $1,000,000. Also, we have installed supervisory controls & variable speed drives on existing HVAC equipment as well as a building-wide energy management system. We have equipped our kitchen refrigerators with energy efficient thermostats, as well as replacing outdated equipment in our Welding Shop.

As far as energy conservation efforts go we have taken measures to reduce our energy consumption. The lights and computers of rooms are always shut off when unoccupied; light sensors were installed in classrooms. We set a school-wide temperature during heating(ex. 60 degrees) and cooling seasons (ex. 72-74 degrees) as opposed to each individual classroom getting it's own temperature. We have trained our staff on our energy management system and efforts.

From the year 2004 to present we have reduced our costs tremendously with all of our conservation, and renewable energy effors. Our savings went from $31,000 in the year 2005, to $151,000 in 2008. In 2004 we consumed 2,537,806 kiloWatt hours. Due to our effors, in 2008 that value was almost cut in half consuming 1,597,964 kiloWatt hours from the electric company.