Oct 9, 2017 2 min read

Washington High School’s football stadium is going solar.

Eighteen solar panels, donated by a social services agency in the city, have been placed atop the stadium fieldhouse off Tyler Avenue. Two banks of nine panels were positioned on a flat roof last Tuesday afternoon, one in front of the other, waiting to be hooked up for use.

Make that uses.

“As they generate power, they’ll be feeding electricity into the building,” said Rick Mancini, business manager for Washington School District. “We’ll get credit on our electric bill. We’ll also be using it as a teaching mode for teachers.”

Blueprints, known until a month ago as Community Action Southwest, provided the panels from a building it owns at 365 Jefferson Ave. – not far from Wash High. Blueprints operates at 150 W. Beau St.

“We were in the process of putting a new roof on our building,” said Jeff Fondelier, vice president of operations. “It would have been very costly to lift the solar panels and reposition them, so we reached out to Washington High School. They made arrangements to remove them.”

Mancini said Rich Florida, founder, vice president and co-owner of Florida Consulting of Pittsburgh, works for the school district and Blueprints. Florida, a Wash High graduate, “asked if we were interested and said the panels had another 10 to 12 years of life. We were thinking of putting them on the high school roof, but that was too labor-intensive and we would have had to run all kinds of cable.”

Insana’s Towing & Crane Service, of Canton Township, lifted the panels off the roof on Jefferson and transported them up Tyler to the stadium, placing them on top of the fieldhouse.

“Everything in the system is donated. The only thing we’re paying for is taking them off the roof and placing them on ours,” said Mancini, who estimated the cost at $1,500.

He said George Kostelnik, the district’s building supervisor, is working with Ed Johnston Baugh, an extension educator for Pennsylvania State University, on making certain the panels and hookups are arranged properly. Mancini said the work should be completed within four weeks.

The process to this point has taken about a month, Mancini added. The transfer was consummated in one day.