The Stag Lodge condo complex is, according to its Web site, “nestled atop Bald Eagle Mountain” in Deer Valley Resort near Park City, Utah. Long a playground for the folks who like to strap boards to their feet and slide down snow-covered mountains, the Stag Lodge condos, as well as the surrounding towns up in ski country, share a common imperfection: That lovely snow also falls on roads and driveways, making access at times inconvenient.   
    That’s where Clay Thornton comes in. Co-owner of Thornton Plumbing and Heating, Inc., based in Midvale, Utah, the 55-employee company was founded in the 1930s by Thornton’s grandfather and has since developed into a specialist in installing both radiant heating systems in the area’s uber-luxurious vacation homes, and large commercial snowmelt systems that serve to keep roads clear so the upscale lodge lizards won’t actually have to use their Range Rovers’ 4WD capabilities.   
    “There are some Hollywood bigwigs who have condos there--a lot of Hollywood directors,” Thornton said. “These are some well-heeled people--they're They’re $4 million to $6 million condos.”   
    The company is no stranger to larger, commercial snowmelt systems: “The first one I ever worked on myself was back in 1978,” Thornton said. “A 10,000 square foot snowmelt system around somebody’s house is what we do every day. We’re doing two homes right now that have anywhere between 8- and 15,000 square feet of snowmelt around the house.”   
    Phase 1 of the Stag Lodge project, completed in November, used some 55,000 feet of PEX tubing, Thornton said, and was supposed to have started up in April 2007. But it ran into a couple of delays brought about by the scope of the project and aesthetic concerns voiced by nearby residents.   
    “The neighbors didn’t want it there because of the structure for the boiler,” Thornton said. Indeed, a glimpse at the drawings of the project shows a place where all of the pipes terminate. That is the site of the mechanical bunker, a structure whose visible exterior surfaces are finished with stone Thornton said you could, “drive a fairly good-sized dump truck” into.   
    “They were worried about sound and the fact there is this industrial-looking building there, although we went to great pains to make it look pretty,” he said.
    Chris Barker, who has been with Thornton for five years, is the project manager at Stag Lodge and he said the project saw several delays because of the building.  “Then they finally let us set the boiler on the cement pad and we were finally able to continue on,” Barker said.
    “Then we built the building around the boiler. Originally the building had the big boiler room structure and then, off to the side, it had room for two dumpsters. We ended up removing the two dumpsters and putting the grade of the earth into the building—kind of buried the sides and the back of it—and then put a lot of mature trees around it.”

The Stag Lodge snowmelt system features a 7 million BTU Unilux boiler and a host of Grundfos circulators installed in a building that caused delays in the project owing to neighbor concerns. Photo courtesy of Thornton Plumbing and Heating, Inc.

The boiler in the controversial building is a 7 million BTU flexible tube gas unit from Unilux in Schenectady, N.Y. that feeds nine zones, each with a big VersaFlo TP series pump from Grundfos.
    Phase 1 of the Stag Lodge snowmelt system was planned to be up and running at the beginning of November, just a few weeks past the first snowfall in the area. Thornton was bidding Phase 2 of the project—with a projected start date in April—at deadline for this issue.   
    Phase 2 will be a few square feet smaller than Phase 1 and it will involve constructing a building for another boiler. Thornton said there should be no delays since that building is slated to be constructed below the road so it would be basically out of sight. The building will house another 7 million BTU Unilux flexible tube gas boiler feeding 10 zones via Grundfos pumps.
    The system in Phase 2 will be about 34,000 square feet. Each zone will have a pair of custom-fabricated manifold blocks: “We make our own manifolds—for snowmelt we do,” Thornton said. “For radiant heat we use manufactured products but for snowmelt we use our T-Drill and we pull our own manifold boxes.”
    Jobs such as the Stag Lodge snowmelt system find their way into Thornton Plumbing’s capable hands via word-of-mouth mostly. Landing that first job and doing it well is key because homeowner’s association presidents talk to each other, Thornton said.
    “About six or seven years ago we did Little Bell, that’s another condo complex,” Thornton said. “Once we did Little Bell the floodgates were opened and everybody asked who did the snowmelt system there because now you go up there on a snowy day and everything is very pristine looking instead of dirty brown piles of snow. The Ironwood complex found out we did Little Bell so we wound up doing the Ironwood complex, too. Then the Sterlingwood complex came along and wanted to install snowmelt. They found out we did Ironwood so we wound up doing Sterlingwood. When it came to this Stag Lodge we were already working with them but the biggest reason we got the job is because they saw what we did at the Little Bell, Ironwood and Sterlingwood—and all of the other condo complexes we had previously done.”
    Barker and Thornton are pretty specific when it comes to offering suggestions to contractors who may be thinking about tackling this type of work. Barker said the main thing to consider is, doing the job right the first time will save the customer money over the long haul.
    Thornton agreed: “We clean up a lot of snowmelt systems and it’s much more expensive to fix things down the line than it is to do it right in the beginning,” Thornton said. “It’s usually the people who [give jobs to the low bidders] who wind up having us come in and redo it."