St. Mary’s South Side Catholic – North Wing

The Behrmann Company

Old School Boiler, Meets New School Efficiency

From a 60-Year-Old Boiler Room to a 20% Efficiency Gain: St. Mary’s Catholic High School Modernizes Without Missing a Beat

Facility

St. Mary’s South Side Catholic School has been educating young men in St. Louis since 1931.

Boilers

This job used 3 Lochinvar FTXL boilers

Pumps

We supplied a full suite of Taco in-line and end suction pumps

Install

We worked with Martin-Jetco HVAC to make sure St. Mary’s got up and running with no issues.

Replacing a 60 year old boiler set with modern, high-efficiency solutions.

A deeper Dive

The building’s original boiler set had been in service since 1964 — massive, inefficient units that had outlived their design life. Decades of wear, combined with outdated heating standards left the school with a system that was expensive to run and increasingly unreliable.
St. Mary’s needed more than a like-for-like swap. The school needed modern equipment that could fit a tighter footprint, run more efficiently, and give facilities staff confidence that a single point of failure wouldn’t mean a cold building in the middle of a Missouri winter.

Behrmann designed and supplied a complete replacement heating package: three Lochinvar FTXL 1000 condensing boilers, paired with Taco in-line and end-suction pumps, a new expansion tank, and a neutralization kit to handle condensate discharge. Martin-Jetco HVAC handled the mechanical installation.
Moving from two oversized boilers to three smaller, high-efficiency units gave the school both a smaller mechanical footprint and true redundancy — a combination the old boiler setup could never offer.

Removing equipment that had been sitting in the same mechanical space since 1964 was no small task. The old boiler’s sheer size, combined with the tight, aging layout of the mechanical room, made the teardown and removal one of the more physically demanding parts of the job.
Timing added another layer of difficulty. The crew had to plan the work around the school’s calendar, minimizing disruption to classes and campus life throughout the project.

St. Mary’s chose Behrmann on the strength of an existing relationship and a track record the school already trusted. Reputation mattered, but so did the equipment: Lochinvar’s condensing boiler technology gave the school a proven, high-efficiency platform to build the new heating plant around.
Rich Perkins managed the project for Behrmann, coordinating with Martin-Jetco HVAC to keep the installation on schedule and aligned with the school’s needs from start to finish.

Summation

St. Mary’s Catholic High School spent over sixty years relying on two aging boilers that had become a growing liability. By replacing them with three Lochinvar FTXL 1000 condensing boilers, Behrmann and Martin-Jetco HVAC gave the school a modern heating plant that’s more efficient, more resilient, and easier to maintain — installed without disrupting a single day of the school year. It’s a clear example of what a trusted relationship and the right equipment package can deliver for a facility that simply can’t afford downtime.