Underground Hot Water heating parts of Trinity?

redman

Hi

Im a BSc graduate from Trinity and many years ago I was told that Trinity use to use hot water than ran under the college to heat various rooms including some of the dorms.

Does anyone had any details or the facts behind this?

Many thanks in advance

Redman

Outkast_IRE

They were probably talking about a district heating system . Where the hot water for heating comes from an energy centre somewhere on campus and is piped underground to each building

redman

Thanks , it was referring to an 19/20th Century underground flow of hot water that Trinity leveraged but not a modern Geothermal system....

Peregrinus

There aren't any natural hot water flows under Trinity (or anywhere under Dublin) than can be tapped for heating or other energy.

When the GMB was built around 1900 it has the first central heating plant in College. It was a vast coal-fired thing that burned a quarter of a ton of coal every night during the winter. At that time other college buildings were mainly heated by fireplaces in rooms.

I think the 1937 Reading Room - built, as you'd expect, in 1937 - was the next building to have central heating installed. That was also coal-fired.

Postwar central heating systems were oill-fired. I seriously doubt that there are any heating systems in college powered by hot water. It's entirely possible, though, that there are systems which use underground hot water to transfer heat between building.

redman

Well thank you for taking the time to reply and quite interesting too!