Historic abbey’s school considers boiler upgrades a blessing
Founded by the English Benedictine community in 1926, the Portsmouth Abbey School is a coeducational, high school academy that sits on a 500-acre campus on the shores of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. The school is also a residence for its 360 students and to the monks who live at its monastery. For the abbey’s director of operations, Paul Jestings, the institution represents both an extraordinary heritage and an extraordinarily complex heating and hot water challenge: sixty buildings served by a mix of individual units and central heating plants, fueled by oil, propane, solar and soon, natural gas.