Recently, the Picone Family and their longtime friend, local firearms store owner Ira Levin, were convinced that they could build a successful private gun club with ample room for up to 30 shooters. Theirs facility was to be second-to-none, with clients able to access the range 24 hours a day through fingerprint recognition. Construction started without issue, but about halfway through, the Picone’s began to realize that proper gun range ventilation and air quality were a major concern. The Picone’s had interviewed several engineering and construction firms, but things just never added up. Encon was introduced to Paul and Beth through a mutual acquaintance and we got to work the moment we met.
Ventilation was the key concern. Areas of the building not occupied by active shooters must be maintained at a higher pressure than the shooting areas. Air must move over the shooters at a rapid enough rate to assure that all smoke and bullet residue moves down range. The air that must be recirculated then has to be cleaned through special gun range HEPA filtration systems, ensuring the safest indoor air quality for both patrons and staff. Furthermore, it was simply too cost prohibitive to heat and cool the large volume of air required for ventilation. Therefore, means and methods had to be developed to inject specific quantities of conditioned air into the system and mix that air with the highly filtered return air.
The final design incorporated over 125 Horsepower of equipment. Since members have full access to the club at their convenience, the ventilation and comfort components must be available to a population that could range from zero to 30 people at any time. Were the equipment simply allowed to operate on a 24 hour basis, operating costs would exceed $125,000 a year. Our fully integrated digital control system allows every significant motor to react not only to the building population and to also assure that the occupants strategically occupy the specified portions of the structure to minimize operating costs. The control system is also set up to notify building operating personnel when it is necessary to change filters and make other system adjustments.
Other functions such as monitoring critical functions are a vital component. To assist the gun range operating personnel to understand and make changes, they were provided with full color graphics viewable at any computer or cell phone. It has been amazing and truly gratifying to watch people go through training provided by Encon and become experts at system operations in only a short period of time. The systems have currently been in operation for almost a year and Beth and Paul tell us that operating costs are not much more than their home.
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