Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 27, 1994 TAG: 9403280133
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It is Aust and his computer system that decide how much heat or air-conditioning to provide to the high school, Southwest Virginia Governor's School and, across town, Critzer Elementary School.
He makes sure food-freezer temperatures are cold enough to preserve their contents but not so cold as to give freezer burn. He handles such matters as illumination, from night and emergency lighting to lights on the high school tennis court.
``I'm the guy that's between a rock and a hard place,'' he says cheerfully, ``because they're wanting to save on costs of energy and also they're wanting to have a comfortable environment.''
He does it all so efficiently that most of those in the schools remain blissfully unaware of his overseeing their various utilities.
But from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m., Aust is monitoring all those systems from his crowded cubicle in the middle of the school's cavernous rooftop chamber, beneath criss-crossing conduit pipes large and small piping water to radiators or covering electrical or telephone wiring.
Even when he is not there, his computer system stays on the job, turning systems on and off at the programmed times so the buildings are comfortable when people begin arriving in the morning.
The upper area is known to long-timers at the high school as ``The Penthouse.''
The name came from a sign that someone posted over the door leading up to it when the school was being built more than 20 years ago.
Now the sign over the door says ``Electrical/Mechanical,'' but to many it always will be known by its original title. You reach it by climbing three short flights of stairs beyond the door.
Aust's little room in its midst, filled with electrical panels and computer equipment and stacks of reference materials, was created by putting up wall partitions and a door. The outside of one wall is all but buried in multicolored wiring and cables linking the equipment inside to the schools.
``I guess we've put enough wire in here to go from here to Blacksburg and back,'' he said.
The color and look of the banks of switch-laden boxes around his room reflect, to Aust, a history of its expansion over the years.
``They put me here to look at the building as it was getting built,'' he said, and he has been involved with it ever since. He can tell you which section was added when, how the school's electrical class students helped, and much more.
Aust chuckles at his own enthusiasm for expounding on the setup to anyone who makes the simplest inquiry. ``He asks me how fast the car`s going, I tell him how to build a car,'' he said.
Outside his four walls, there are shelves of discarded computer monitors, printers and other technology that has been surpassed. It is Aust's personal little technology museum.
``I'm kind of one of those fellows that doesn't throw anything away,'' he said. ``You throw it away, you need it the next day.''
Another walled-off section under the ``penthouse'' roof is the school's communications center. Aust displays one of the pagers instituted by Principal Tom DeBolt to replace what used to be frequent announcements over the public address system so, Aust said, ``you don't disturb 1,500 people to get one person.''
It was also DeBolt who got Aust a new computer for still more efficiency. ``Right now, you're kind of catching us in a transition period with the new software,'' Aust said.
Rather than just throwing onto the screen columns of data such as temperatures in various parts of the buildings, the new system will show illustrations of actual rooms or building sections and their temperatures.
Aust is a Pulaski County native who, in college, built an amateur radio antenna in his woodworking course. ``I ended up talking to a guy in Texas on it.''
He taught industrial arts in the Fairfax County school system before joining a research company in Alexandria. When that company was hit by layoffs, he came back to Southwest Virginia and worked at Sprague Electric in Carroll County before eventually joining the school system in Pulaski County.
``Gradually worked my way back home,'' he said.
During his teaching years in Northern Virginia, Aust removed the seats from an old school bus and equipped half of it with his bed, kitchen sink, bathtub and toilet and the other half with his radio equipment. ``That was back in the days of the vacuum tube,'' he said, before tiny transistors came along.
``It's one of the fields where it gets smaller, it gets better, it gets cheaper,'' he said. ``I guess I was born a tinkerer.''
He stayed in the bus while teaching and drove it home to Pulaski County each summer. ``The bus episode lasted several years. Then I got married. The wife wouldn't move into the bus so I had to scrap that idea.''
by CNB