Geothermal Installation at Miyamura High School
Bottom Left Panel of Work of Strength
by Be Sargent
The Work of Strength Mural is on the north side of the McKinley County Adult Detention Center and, because of the fence, is hard to see. This panel shows workers employed by MAKWA, the Native-owned construction company that built the new high school. Workers are in the process of inserting a loop of flexible tubing into one of two hundred seventy 240-ft-deep holes drilled in the parking lot area of the high school.
Once installed, these pipes will be filled with water that will stay at 55 degrees, the constant temperature just below the earth’s surface. This geothermal temperature is not to be confused with the much hotter temperatures that exist thousands of feet down, hot enough to boil water to run a turbine and create electricity.
In this system, two hundred loops of tube get to the high school in trenches 5 feet deep, below the frost line, and are joined together in a huge manifold. They become one closed system, above dropped ceilings. Every two rooms have a heat pump and a fan which circulates the air in the rooms.
In the winter, when the outside temperature may be freezing or below, the heat pump bumps up the 55-degree heat from the closed system to a comfortable temperature of 70 degrees.
Heat pumps have in them a gas that absorbs heat very quickly. That heat is compressed to create more heat and this heat is then circulated in the rooms by means of a fan.
In summer a heat pump is operated in reverse and the excess heat is sucked out of the rooms and absorbed by the 55 degree geothermal system which takes the excess heat and returns it to the ground under the parking lot and returns to the building at 55, much cooler than the outside air, which may be 90 or more.
The temperature inside the school is kept at a comfortable 70 degrees winter and summer.
Gallup should be proud that Miyamura High school has such an energy efficient system which only uses a small amount of electricity to compress the vapor in the heat pumps and run the fans. This geothermal installation will save energy for years to come.
Unfortunately most of the rest of us are using outdated fossil-fuel-burning, carbon-creating furnaces.
For more information on the system at Miyamura go see Ron Triplehorn, Assistant Principal.
How to Blow Up a Drawing
People are always asking “How do you blow up your drawing on such a big wall?”
There is actually a very simple method that has been used by muralists for hundreds of years.
You will need a scale drawing. Make careful measurements of the wall to be painted. You may have been doing hundreds of concept sketches but to create a scale drawing, you will need exact dimensions.
If the wall is 10 feet high, you may want to have 1 inch of the drawing equal 1foot of the mural. If there is a lot of detail, you may want to have 4 inches on the drawing equal 1 foot on the mural.
At the scale of 1“=1’, your drawing will be 10 inches high; if the scale is 4”= 1’ then your drawing will be 40 inches high.
I usually work at 1”= 1’ scale with the idea that I will lay out the big shapes and add detail on the job. For portraits in the design I often do a sketch at full size that I can refer to on the job.
So now you have a finished drawing with one-inch squares.
Your next step is to create one foot squares on the wall.
Snapping chalk lines with a helper is easiest although you can hammer a nail in at one end of the line and snap it solo.
Now you take your drawing to the wall and with a chalk, pencil or thinned down paint you identify the same square on both wall and drawing, numbering the lines may be necessary if you are dealing with a big area.
Look carefully at a square on the scale drawing. Where do the lines of the drawing intersect with the one-inch grid? Do they intersect the square in the middle, at the corner or somewhere in between? When you are oriented in this way, boldly draw the line on the wall!
This sounds hard and sometimes you may not be sure if the line intersects one third or one quarter up the square but you will find that the method corrects itself as you progress from square to square.
The only heartbreak is when you are drawing in the wrong square, in which case you should bring a hanky for your tears.
