Library Collections: Document: Full Text

The plan for warming and ventilating the building by steam, recommended in the report of last year, was adopted, and the description of the work occupies several pages of the document before us. The work upon one-half of the house was commenced early in the spring, and occupied the entire season. The construction of the air chambers in the basement by the removal of the cross walls, and the cutting down and rebuilding the corridor wails for the waffling and ventilating flues, was attended with great difficulty and expense. The new building erected is thus described:

"The boiler house, constructed especially for this purpose, and placed in the rear of the Asylum buildings, at a distance of one hundred feet from them, is one hundred and thirty feet long by forty wide, built of brick, two stories high, with slate roof. The first floor is divided into four apartments; one for the blowers, one for a wash house, one for an engine room, in which is placed a thirty-horse power beam engine, fourteen-inch cylinder, and four-feet stroke, for pumping water, driving the blowers, and for propelling the washing machinery, and a boiler room forty feet square, in which are set the two drop flue boilers, eight feet in diameter and twenty-six feet long. The boiler flues are twelve inches in diameter, placed in three ranges, six flues in each range; thus carrying the heat three times through the boiler, thence passing along the under surface of the boiler, giving to each boiler fifteen hundred feet of fire surface. The boilers connect with the chimney stack by an under-ground flue, three feet six inches in diameter. The chimney is one hundred feet high, in shape of a gently tapering octagon, ten feet in diameter at the bottom, built of brick, resting on a granite base. The smoke flue in the chimney is three feet six inches in diameter, rising sixty feet, surrounded by an air space for ventilation of the rear buildings. The boilers send off their steam by a ten inch main, and the condensed water returns by a four-inch main, and is raised by a steam pump into the boiler."

The steam from the boilers, above described, passes through the main pipe to the building, and is distributed to the radiating coils in the air chambers, over which a current of air is forced by a large fan-wheel driven by a steam engine. In cold weather it is thus warmed before it enters the patients' apartments; in summer it becomes cooled on its way through the large under-ground passage between the engine-house and main building, and passes into the rooms at a lower temperature than the external atmosphere. The foul air escapes through ventilating flues equal in size to those for the admission of pure air. These terminate in a common trunk in the attic, having its external opening at the cupola. A fan, worked in such a manner, must prove the most reliable means of ventilation yet adopted.

The remainder of the report is filled with the usual details in reference to the shops, farm and garden, with numerous acknowledgments for donations to the library and green-house.