De Chantal Apartments is a high-rise building built in 1974 as a middle income senior citizen complex providing affordable, independent senior living in the Adirondacks.  The building has 11 floors with 131 units.  Due to damage and deterioration from bad water quality, the building needed the oil-fired boiler and domestic hot water system replaced.

JSE provided the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing Engineering design services for this project.  The existing heating system posed a challenge.  In 2006 new 4,360,000 BTU steam boilers were installed to replace the existing ones.  The system has been plagued with water quality problems and maintainability issues which JSE worked to solve.  The steam boilers also fed the domestic water heat exchangers causing the oversized boilers to run and add to the building’s energy usage in order to maintain the domestic water load.  The existing steam boilers were replaced with new high efficiency boilers and pumps with variable frequency drives.  The entire boiler room was re-piped to accommodate the new boilers.