Perhaps the most important contribution Eisenreich and his staff made to the 2013 Lambeau Field expansion was the experience they gained from involvement in a host of projects over the years.
“We’ve been through enough projects that we have a good feel for what works and what doesn’t work here,” Eisenreich says. “We have four or five main guys who have been here for 20-plus years, and the rest of my crew came here after the (2003) renovation, so they’ve been here 10-plus years. We live it, and we work with it every day, and we know what works and what doesn’t work. We do a thorough job on selecting on the front end, so on the back end there is ease of maintenance.”
They put that experience to work first with their early involvement in the planning and design of the project — a role they are accustomed to.
“On a typical project, we do the planning,” Eisenreich says. “So when we’re working on plumbing. I’ll pull the plumber in, and when we’re working on electrical systems, I’ll pull my electrician in. They all have their hands in the planning.
“When it’s actually being built, they’re on the site daily working with the contractors. Sometimes, a contractor has a question — ‘How would you like this done? This way or this way?’ — and they can answer it right there. If they see something that’s not quite right or not quite the way we want it done, they can address that right away. They walk the site daily.
“During the actual construction, we use all outside contractors, and we work very closely with them. Post-construction, the majority of our maintenance work is done in house unless it’s a project that’s just too big and we don’t have the staff or the time to get it done. We have a plumber on staff and he has some helpers, so we do most of the post-construction work in-house.
Lambeau Field’s architecture have presented Eisenreich and his staff with numerous challenges in seeking to design, maintain and operate a facility with many different types of areas, from luxury suites and banquet facilities to locker rooms and aluminum benches for fans. Perhaps the greatest challenge is ensuring all of these areas operate efficiently, whether they are indoor or outdoor.
“One great challenge here is that we’re a large facility with many indoor and outdoor components to it, so getting the water throughout the facility, many times the water needs to travel in an unconditioned space,” Eisenreich says. “We have to be careful how we manage that. We’re looking at heat-trace insulation on those pipes where they’re exposed. It goes back to a controller so we can make sure the heat trace is on.
“In the restrooms themselves, we like to look at (plumbing) chases so we can have a whole row of fixtures and have a chase so we can get behind them and actually work on them. It makes for an easier install, where a lot of the systems can be put together off-site and brought and installed that way.”
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