VILLAGE OF EAST SYRACUSE – Bringing along flotation devices and a lifeguard whistle for their presentation in front of the East Syracuse Village Board, a group of fourth and fifth graders from East Syracuse Elementary School described their summer-saving solution for the overheating pumps at Hanlon Pool.
The members of the school’s robotics club Cheetahbots shared that the public pool on McCool Avenue uses two pumps connected to a filter system to circulate the water. After touring the pump room with the directors of the local parks and recreation department, Tom Richardson and Keith Caiello, the kids discovered that those pumps can shut down and even catch on fire when they become too hot. In the event of such a malfunction, the pool needs to be closed because the water would eventually turn unsanitary. The parks department had already tried to improve ventilation by both cutting an opening in the top half of the door to the pump room and employing the use of two fans running constantly through the summer months, but the problem has not been fully fixed and the department has grown concerned about its electricity use, the students said.
Upon gathering information from videos, diagrams and an interview with a local homeowner, the elementary schoolers decided the best route would be to switch to an open loop geothermal system that would cool the pump room and heat the pool using the natural underground spring that runs underneath the village and stays at approximately 72 degrees.
As part of the cost-effective system, a loop pipe would attach to the spring, the water would come up through a heat pump, the heat pump would cool the air in the pump room down to the temperature of the water below, and then the water would be returned to the earth.
The students said that without a preexisting system the implementation of their cooling solution would cost about $10,000. Since the village already has access to an underground spring, however, the cost would be lower, they said.
Mayor Lorene Dadey awarded the young presenters with certificates of appreciation at the April 10 village board meeting.
“They really did their homework,” Dadey said. “They’ve done a phenomenal job, and a lot of research and time went into this, and a lot of fact-finding.”
The Cheetahbot team competed over the winter in the FIRST LEGO League Challenge, an international competition that took them to Buffalo for regionals.
A portion of their task load was devoted to building a LEGO robot that pushes, pulls and lifts its way to completing a series of missions, or “event journeys,” in order to score points. The other aspect of the competition involved investigating a problem related to the theme of renewable energy.
“They could solve any energy problem that they could think of, but they wanted to do something that would benefit their community right here in East Syracuse,” said Michele Coolbeth, the school librarian and co-coach of the robotics team with math specialist Molly McGarry.
The team of elementary schoolers started their green energy project in early October and met weekly through January.