BU HVAC manager Chris Gorman (center) with members of his team in front of their 120 Ashford Street offices.

Campus & Facilities

Meet the Team That Keeps BU Cool during the Hot Summer Months

And warm during those frigid winter days

Mike Downing is standing on the roof of Student Village 2, at 33 Agganis Way, high above the building’s modern lobby, on a recent summer morning. He’s surrounded by a panoramic view of the Boston skyline, which he hardly seems to notice. 

Carrying an armful of long black pipes, Downing opens the metal door to a cooling tower and enters. Inside, the HVAC mechanic expertly attaches the pipes to valves, adjusting various controls as he goes. After a few seconds, rusty water begins gushing from the pipes. 

The unit provides fresh air to StuVi 2’s corridors, he explains. Once flushed of wintertime solvents, it will ensure that the building’s hallways remain as cool and fresh as its individual apartments. 

“It’s called flushing the coil,” he explains. 

Downing is part of BU’s Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) team, a group of 25 technicians tasked with the critical job of keeping BU’s Charles River Campus buildings cool in hot weather and warm in winter. 

The team is led by HVAC manager Chris Gorman, whose career began the day after graduating high school. Now a 40-year veteran, Gorman says one of his favorite parts of the job is getting to play mentor. “I love working with a big group of people,” Gorman says, “I love working with people that want to learn more, like I did, and raising them up through the ranks.”

Gorman’s crew (the oldest member is in his 80s) provides 24/7 support across campus. Daily tasks range from repairing faulty equipment to routine maintenance to responding to late night emergency calls.

To efficiently heat and cool the nearly 140-acre campus, each HVAC technician is assigned a specific area. Downing, who joined BU’s HVAC team 13 years ago, oversees seven West Campus buildings, including StuVi 2, where he’s responsible for everything from the air handler in the basement to the falcon that lives on the roof. 

“I feel it’s my building,” he says with a measure of pride. “No one else knows how it operates.” 

Keeping 50,000 students, faculty, and staff cool

Deep in the StuVi 2 basement, surrounded by pumps, valves, and noisy HVAC machinery, Downing leans over his computer. On the screen is a diagram of one of the apartment’s thermostats, with arrows indicating the flow of air. Hitting a few keys, he demonstrates how he can remotely alter the temperature of any room. 

“The biggest thing I do is computers,” he says. 

Every air-conditioned building on the Charles River Campus is controlled using computers and tablets. In StuVi 2, for example, each apartment unit has a dedicated area with tanks, pumps, and valves that automatically respond to computer settings.

Mechanic Anthony Storella, who joined the HVAC team 25 years ago, says automation is the biggest change in HVAC operations he’s seen in two decades. 

“It really does help quite a bit,” he says. “We can see just about everything we need to see from the computer, and that has made a huge difference in energy management, comfort for the students, and overall service of the equipment.” 

Even with digital tools, the task of keeping the University’s 50,000 students, faculty, and staff cool requires long days. Although the regular summer work shift is 7 am to 3:30 pm, some members of the team may work additional hours or on the hottest and coldest days, extra shifts may be necessary to make everything run smoothly. 

On the day we met up with Downing, he was planning to work until 10 pm, overseeing Agganis Arena’s cooling system during a summer hockey game. He often uses his iPad to check up on West Campus HVAC machinery from home. 

“I care too much,” he says.

Tending to 100-year-old equipment and other challenges

On another recent day, Storella walks through a mechanical room in the Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering, at 610 Comm Ave, surrounded by the hum of HVAC equipment. Like StuVi 2 is Downing’s bailiwick, this building—full of offices, classrooms, and sterile labs—is Storella’s domain. 

On the top floor, seated in one of the building’s lounges, he reflects on a long career in the HVAC industry, more than half spent here at BU. 

“Our biggest challenge is trying to get the best we can out of the equipment that we have, because we have so many buildings and the age of some of the equipment is challenging,” he says. 

Just blocks from the Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering building’s gleaming modern exterior, some South Campus brownstones still have steam boilers from the 1920s. Additionally, AC systems dating from the 1980s—when BU first installed central AC—use a refrigerant that no longer meets environmental standards. When the team repairs this equipment, they often have to replace the system entirely. 

At the same time, buildings like BU’s newest, the recently opened Center for Computing & Data Sciences, employ cutting-edge energy-efficient heating and cooling technology, which requires its own level of expertise. A series of 31 geothermal wells 1500 feet below ground make use of the stable temperatures beneath the Earth’s surface to create a self-balancing system that draws heat from the ground in the winter and pushes heat out in the summer.

Gorman says the team is always looking for ways to make the University more sustainable. 

“We’re plugged in, we know what’s changing out there and where new opportunities are, and we’re always looking for them,” he says. 

Some of the team’s previous projects include an initiative to recycle cooking oil from University dining halls as fuel for the central boiler plant and an extension of the natural gas line that allows the central plant to run on natural gas, which reportedly reduces annual campus CO2 emissions by nearly 4,000 metric tons.

And for anyone wondering about those big campus dorms that still rely on fans to cool rooms, Gorman says that central AC may come to Warren Towers and West in the next 5 to 10 years. The plan is a major capital project, and for now, falls outside the HVAC team’s jurisdiction.

“There have been a lot of problems that we’ve had here in relation to the HVAC systems, and we’ve really made a lot of progress,” Gorman says. “Every year, the summers have gotten a little better.”