Tom Kaldenberg Kirkwood Executive Director of Facilities talks about the new energy efficient hoods in the culinary kitchens of The Hotel Tuesday, April 20, 2010 on the Kirkwood campus in Cedar Rapids. (Brian Ray/The Gazette)

State-of-the-art design and ‘smart systems’ will make the new Hotel at Kirkwood Center an energy miser. The 71-room, $24 million hotel and restaurant at 7725 Kirkwood Blvd. SW, scheduled to open in July, will offer top-shelf guest services and handson teaching opportunities for Kirkwood culinary arts and hotel management students.

Tom Kaldenberg, Kirkwood executive director of facilities, said the centerpiece of the hotel’s energy-saving plan is a series of seven heat pumps that deliver chilled and heated water to various hotel and lab areas on a constant basis. ‘We use the same kind of chillers that you would find at an ice-skating rink,’ Kaldenberg said. ‘The ‘Ice Kube’ chillers create ice in nine large tanks during off-peak nighttime hours when demand and electric rates are lower. The ice will have water circulating around and through it during the day that we will use to cool the Hospitality Arts classrooms, kitchens and Class Act restaurant.’ Kaldenberg said the ‘Ice Kube’ system is linked to another tech­nology embraced by the college: more than 200 geothermal wells for heating and cooling.

‘We run a pipe all the way down to the bottom of a 300-foot well and all the way back up,’ he said. ‘As water moves through that pipe and ground water moves through the well, it transfers heating or cooling.

‘In the winter, we make the ground water cooler and suck the heat out of the ground. In the summer, we make the ground water hotter and suck cooling out of the ground.’ Kaldenberg said variable air handling and exhaust units in the culinary teaching kitchens will save money by adjusting to the level of activity. As the level of smoke rises, the fans in the range hoods speed up to clear the air.

Motion sensors in the hotel detect when a room is not in use, turning lights off. A related system is linked to the guest registration system, allowing unoccupied guest rooms to be ‘dormant’ when they are not occupied.

‘When guests register, the room’s climate and other controls are activated,’ Kaldenberg said.

‘If a sensor built into the thermostat fails to sense movement within 30 minutes after a guest leaves their room, the lights turn off and the temperature is set back to conserve energy.

‘When the guest returns, the system resets the climate and other controls to where they were before the guest left the room. If a heating and cooling unit experiences a problem, a member of the hotel’s staff can slide it out and replace it with one of three that we will keep on standby.’ Kaldenberg said the energy-saving systems added about $750,000 to the overall cost of the hotel, but the return on that investment will be surprisingly quick. ‘Usually we’re in the five-to-six-year range for a payback on geothermal,’ he said. ‘When the White Group, which contracts with Alliant Energy, looked at how we’re shaving energy peaks by using electricity at night, they came up with a payback time of just over two years.

‘We get a $250,000 rebate from Alliant Energy and we will save between $200,000 and $250,000 in energy costs per year.’ Lee Belfield, general manager of the hotel, said the 117,000-square-foot facility will provide culinary arts and hotel management students with valuable experience.

‘As a teaching laboratory, this is world class,’ Belfield said. ‘The equipment will be as good as it gets in any hotel. You would probably have to go to Chicago to find a comparable facility.’