THE NEW community sports facility at Lionel School is progressing well and the site of its huge, red steel skeleton framed against our winter skies brings hope to the hearts of those of us who have so far failed to acheieve ‘peak fitness’.
The concrete foundations are all in place and the steel work is well on the way to being finished by the end of this month. The new facility will include £200,000 worth of renewables in the shape of two wind turbines on the machair behind the school and a ground source heat exchanger. The exchanger is known in the trade as a ‘slinky’ and consists of around 375 metres of coiled pipe buried under the ground. The pipe acts as a closed circuit, pumping water around the system. The water begins its journey at a temperature of 5º, comes back above ground level at 10º and is then fed into a compressor which reduces this large quantity of low temperature heat to a smalller quantity of higher temperature heat allowing it to reach the average 30-40º needed to operate the under floor heating system. As the turbines provide all the electricity needed to operate the slinky, it is hoped that the building’s heating sysytem will be totally self sufficient.
Site Manager Iain Donald Macdonald who gave fios a guided tour of the work in progress. He said,“We have a team of eight here, most of them Ness and West Side boys and we’ve been working away at the foundation stage with not much to show for our efforts – all the work being at or below ground level. But now the structure is up, you get a better feel for the building – and I have to say, its looking good.” The next phase will involve the block work walls and the constuction of the roof and for that, the team need good weather. Alec Murray told fios he was pleased with the job so far and had every hope of completing the project on time and on target.
Calum Iain Macleod, Spòrsnis chair, added, “We are absolutely delighted with the progress so far. Fundraising work will continue to ensure that the new building will be fully equiped when it opens in November 2005”
