PITTSFIELD — The boiler that heats Pittsfield High School is practically brand new and working properly, city officials say — but the pipes that carry that heat through the 95-year-old school are another story.

City workers have worked night shifts over the past week to address too-cold-for-comfort temperatures in some wings of the East Street building.

That includes replacing pipes where possible, and repairing blowers that mix fresh air with heat to deliver warmth to classrooms.

“We had some cold spots,” city maintenance director Brian Filiault told the School Building Needs Commission earlier this week.

Interim Superintendent Latifah Phillips said she heard directly from students about cold temperatures in the building, particularly the art wing and the school gymnasium. Phillips said she and PHS Principal Lynn Taylor walked the building together and had temperature readings taken throughout the building.

Under state regulations, classrooms should be no colder than 66 degrees, Phillips said. "They did have concerns in the art room and the gymnasium, and those have been fixed," she said.

In other areas, she said, district custodial director Dan Moore "let me know that [those rooms] are within the standard. That doesn't necessarily mean it's ideal, but it's really critical for us that it's not below the required temperature."

Pittsfield High School, built in 1931, is the city’s oldest operational school building. Just last year, its boiler — which was a repurposed locomotive engine installed as original equipment — was replaced with a brand-new boiler. That boiler and its controls, purchased and installed by the city at a cost of $3 million, are working as intended, Filiault said.

The pipes, however — many of them hidden behind the school’s classroom and office walls — have corroded, limiting their effectiveness, Filiault said.

“They’re rusted inside, their size is starting to scale down. That makes it hard to push the steam further out,” he told The Eagle on Friday. “Where we can expose those pipes, we cut them out and put new pipes in.”

As for the blowers, years of constant operation, especially in this year’s frigid conditions, eventually take its toll on their parts, such as bearings and motors.

“On some of those units, we had to replace the motors. They go after a while,” Filiault said. “We had to rebuild some of them between the bearings and motors.”

The task was a high enough priority that the city doubled its manpower at the school to get the job done.

“We actually have two techs working a second shift indefinitely so we can get ahead of that and get units up and running,” Filiault told the School Building Needs Commission at its Feb. 3 meeting.

Scheduling repairs on the night shift helps minimize disruptions during the school day, he added.

“As these things deteriorate the more you have to go after it,” he said. “The way to properly do that is gut the whole building.”

Pittsfield High underwent renovations and additions in 1976, and its iconic neo-classical dome was rebuilt in 2011.

While a new West Side elementary school at the Crosby campus is the district's immediate facilities concern, PHS is part of its long-range building plan. Addressing the building's heating issues the past week is "definitely helping me to understand the planning we're going to need to do in future years," Phillips said.