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Spring Lake Park-Blaine-Mounds View Fire Station

The fire department serving Spring Lake Park, Blaine and
Mounds View, Minn., is a leader in fire prevention and
emergency response training. In the fall of 2006, the three
municipalities opened a new state-of-the-art fire station in
Blaine. The $4.7 million facility includes a large training
center and meeting rooms, with the latest in audio-visual
equipment and firefighting simulators. When it came to
space conditioning, the cities chose equally leading-edge
technology: an energy-efficient geothermal system, designed
by Steen Engineering, which handled all HVAC, plumbing and
electrical design for the new station.

Steen engineered a 60-ton closed-loop geothermal system,
taking advantage of earth’s constant temperature to heat and
cool the 34,000-square-foot building. Water circulates through
a field of 60 130-foot deep vertical wells, either absorbing or
rejecting heat. Individual air heat pumps distribute heating and
cooling to the various zones within the facility – usually providing
both to different rooms simultaneously.

A radiant in-floor heating system was designed for the
station’s apparatus bay and occupies half the building space.
The bay houses emergency vehicles, an alarm room and
truck wash. Adjacent to the apparatus bay is a 210 kW
emergency generator, designed to keep the station operating
in the event of a power outage or crisis situation.

From the start, the three city councils and fire chief
were committed to developing geothermal heating and
cooling and optimizing energy efficiency. Thanks to annual
energy savings generated by the new geothermal system,
its payback period should be less than 12 years.