Visitors to museum have been watching a major transformation going on at the John L Wehle Gallery for the past two seasons.
But what visitors can see from the Great Meadow is just a hint of what is an extensive $2.7 million renovation that has seen much of the gallery interior gutted and the entrance demolished as new systems, storage and display areas were installed.
The result: a modern, re-designed, energy-efficient building that opened August 7, 2012.
Serious work began in April 2011 on the 35-year-old building that previously had been heated with oil and cooled with electricity.
All that was replaced with a new geo-thermal system that uses the earth itself to control the environment.
Forty-two 140-foot wells were drilled behind the gallery, tapping into the earth’s natural heating and cooling ability. (Below 10 feet, it’s usually a steady 55 degrees.)
During the summer when the building’s ambient temperature exceeds that of the ground,
pumps are used to draw heat from the building into a transfer medium (water and glycol) that is pumped through narrow pipes into the ground where the heat is dissipated in the earth.
In the winter the process is reversed. Heat pumps extract heat from the ground and use it to heat the building.
When the outside temperature dips below 40 degrees, a 10-kw heater in each room provides supplementary heating.
In addition, the earth beneath the building becomes a heat sink, assisting in summer cooling.
The mass of the storage room walls was increased with grout slurry pumped into open cavities.