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Ready for Bears: the mechanical systems are the stars of the Chicago Bears' renovated football stadium.

Article Excerpt
The Chicago Bears will open renovated Soldier Field on Monday Night Football Sept. 29 against their archrival, the Green Bay Packers. The new stadium has generated plenty of wisecracks by Chicagoans. Preservationists insisted that the historic colonnades of Soldier Field be maintained, and the new stadium, some say, looks as if a giant UFO has landed on top of it.

The mechanical contractors working on the project, however, say the inside is spectacular.

The new Soldier Field is a complete rebuilding of a stadium that held more than 100,000 people when it opened in 1924. It was, despite that impressive capacity, a lousy place to view a football game. The interior of the stadium inside the colonnades was gutted and an entirely new structure put in place.

Pumped-up plumbing

An infrastructure contractor brought in the water supply, explains Jim Barnas, project manager for Great Lakes Plumbing & Heating. Great Lakes held the plumbing contract for the stadium.

Great Lakes brought the water in through two 12-in. lines into a Metropolitan Industries booster package of three 100-hp pumps that are controlled by a variable frequency drive. Total capacity is specified at 2,700 gpm, but the VFD can turn that down to as little as 20 gpm, Barnas says. Water comes out the booster pumps into a 14-in. feed main and then into an 8-in. cold-water loop that circulates through the entire lower level of the building.

Seventy-five risers come up from the loop, some up to 70 ft. and others as much as 120 ft. to the suite levels, Barnas says. Great Lakes used Victaulic fittings on galvanized pipe 5 in. and larger and Anvil's Gruvlock fittings on Type 1. copper from 2 in. to 4 in. in diameter. Any pipe smaller was sweat.

Hot water pipe was not extensive because so much of it is point-of-use.

In the lower level, three Armstrong heat exchangers take water from Cleaver-Brooks boilers (installed by Hill Mechanical) and heat it to two temperatures for either cooking or bathing.

Two of the heat exchangers produce 50 gpm at 100[degrees]F rise for concourse level cooking and cleaning. The third heat exchanger produces...