BIG CONTRACTS

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 188, 8 May 1934, Page 10

BIG CONTRACTS

Plant For New City Buildings REMARKABLE LIFTS For the purpose of letting contracts amounting to approximately £30,000 Cor lighting, heating, and elevator plant in the Colonial Mutual Building and the Prudential Building, at present under construction in Wellington, Mr. Harold A. Rorke, consulting engineer of Sydney. is visiting New Zealand. Mr. Horke has investigated the local conditions with a view to the installation of the most modern and efficient apparatus. The most interesting innovation to Wellington which the buildings will contain will be the type of automatic lifts used.

Mr. Horke informed "The Dominion” last night that the lifts would have “collective automatic control.'’ which would allow them to perform without human aid such remarkable feats that the services of a liftman would hardly be necessary, even at the busiest times. The chief difficulty of automatic lifts, he pointed out., was that they passed floors at which people were waiting, so that if, say, a person got in at the top floor and pressed the button for the ground floor other people on intermediate floors wanting to descend could not .use the lift until the first passenger had ridden to the bottom and got out. Lifts That Remember. The new lifts would have an "iip” button and a “down” button on each floor which a passenger would press according to his desire to ascend or descend. If the lift were on a trip and another person on the way wanting to get in pressed the appropriate button, the lift would stop at his floor when it was passing it, and wait six seconds for the new passenger to get in. The lift would obey the new summons no matter what the first passenger inside did. If, however, the lift were already fully loaded when it obtained the second calfit would not stop to pick tip the additional passenger, but would deliver its load t° their destinations and then return to the floor for the person it had had to leave behind. Furthermore, if traffic from one particular floor were especially heavy the lift could be adjusted so that it always returned to that floor for more passengers after it had discharged one load. This type of lift had been devised only three or four years ago, said Mr. Horke. Electric Central Heating The possibility of using electric boilers for the central heating systems of the buildings has been considered, but they will have furnaces as usual. Electric boilers had many advantages, said Mr. Rorke, but the price of electricity was too high in Wellington. If the companies could get the night rate in the daytime they could install electric heating, but at the present daytime rate electric heating would not be economical. Heat was wanted most in a building in the day, and heating water at night and storing it, as was done ■in dwellings, was not practicable for a large building. He had calculated that electric heating would cost four times what oil heating would cost in Wellington.

Electric boilers were used very successfully in England and America, instead of oil or coke furnaces. The system was exactly similar to the older ones in that water pipes ran through the building to iron radiators, but instead of an oil or coke furnace there was a boiler with an electric element in it. Its advantages were that it was completely automatic, the temperature of the building being controlled without attention, that no flues were needed and that stores of fuel did not have to be laid in with dirtiness in the case of coke and legal difficulty over storage in the case of oil. In America large buildings were heated by electricity, and 30 or 40 horse-power boilers —sufficient to run a small factory—were in use. Big Consumption of Cheap-Power. Such development was possible m overseas countries because the of production of electricity was cheaper than here, said Mr. Rorke. Not only was there abundant water power in America and cheap coal in England, but also there was a very great consumption of power, and. as with othei products, the price decreased with an increase in consumption. New Zealand had water power and probably the price would come down here. The fact that Wellington had a profit on its electricity department was an indication that the price would fall ultimately. If the rate could be reduced more potential consumers would change over to electricity, and there would be a “snowball effect,” the greater use of current enabling a more wholesale production and a reduction in the cost.

Mr. Rorke said that it was his intention to let no contracts outside New Zealand.