Frisco High senior Ainsley Campbell outside Beavers Bend Park, where she installed 10 bat houses this summer.

By Bill Sullivan

Thanks to a 17-year-old Frisco High senior, a portion of the bat population of Beavers Bend Park enjoys a higher standard of living these days. As part of a Girl Scout project, Ainsley Campbell (an Ambassador in Troop 1289) built and installed a total of 10 bat houses in the park, her own way of saying thanks to one of nature’s most sustainable and efficient forms of pest control.

When Frisco Green Living learned about her efforts, we contacted Ainsley to see if she would be willing to share her thoughts on what drew her to the project, how she went about it, and what she learned in the process.

Here’s what she had to say:

FGL:  How did you get interested in the bat houses project?

Ainsley: I got started in the bat houses project through my Girl Scout Gold Award project.  I was concerned by both the amount of pesticides people were using and the large insect population in our city’s parks. I found that the bat boxes were a great form of sustainable pest control.

FGL: Were you aware beforehand of the positive impact bats have on their environment?

Ainsley: I was aware that bats eat insects, but I was unaware of the huge role bats can fill in balancing ecosystems. In the media and in people’s minds, bats are often perceived in a negative light. Through my project, I hoped to change the public’s view on bats and get rid of their image as scary or harmful creatures.

FGL: Are you interested in environmental issues in general? If so, what kind?

Ainsley: I am very interested in environmental issues and am planning on majoring in either environmental science or environmental engineering in college. I am mainly interested in reducing the amount of chemicals that are put into our environment and our food. I think that going into the future, it is going to be important to find a way for humans to live comfortably while keeping in harmony with our environment. Bat boxes are just one form of sustainable pest control that benefits both humans and the environment they are placed in.

FGL: Did anyone help you with the project? Were other Scouts or Troops involved?

Ainsley: I was very lucky to have the help and guidance of Jeremy Starritt of Frisco Environmental Services. My parents, Dana and Rachel Campbell, and my Girl Scout leaders, Jan Sakowski and Ranya Fulton, were also extremely supportive and pivotal to my success. This was an individual project.

In researching her project, Ainsley learned that the houses are most effective when placed in relatively tall trees near bodies of water.

FGL: How did you decide where to place the bat houses?

Ainsley: Based on Mr. Starritt’s advice, I placed the bat boxes in relatively tall trees, mainly by bodies of water.  Mosquitoes and other disease-carrying insects often congregate around areas of standing water.

FGL: Do you go back regularly to check on them?

Ainsley: I have been back to the park twice to check on them. Luckily, they are all still hanging!

FGL: Do the bats seem to be using them? Any surprises about the way it has worked out?

Ainsley: Since bats are nocturnal animals, it is difficult to tell if bats are “using” them without disturbing them. However, there do seem to be signs of use, such as possible bat guano.

FGL: What did you learn from this project? Do you consider it a success?

Ainsley: From this project I learned how easy it is to make a small change that could affect the park for years to come. I also learned how beneficial bats are to an ecosystem. I do consider this project a success due to the positive feedback I have received from the community. Frisco has such beautiful parks, and it is important that people are able to enjoy them.

A Pano cube attached to the back of a monitor at Frisco Public Library. The new technology helps save both space and energy. Image: friscogreenliving.com.

By Bill Sullivan

If you have paid a visit to the Computer Lab at Frisco Public Library over the last year or so, you probably noticed some changes.

It’s cooler. (Literally.)  Quieter, too. You may even have taken note of a lot more leg room under the tables now that those space-eating, noise-making, heat-producing Central Processing Units are mostly a thing of the past. (A few remain for training purposes.)

“The lab was a very noisy place, needless to say, with 30 some-odd computers whirring along and fans running everywhere,” Library Systems Coordinator Gary Werchan says. “Now, as you can hear, that’s clearly no longer the case.

“You can barely hear a pin drop in here some days. It’s a lot more pleasant environment to work in than it was before.”

Pano cubes take the place of CPUs without any reduction in user functionality. Image: friscogreenliving.com.

Credit this to some clever use of about $83,000, part of an Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) the City of Frisco received from the federal government to help make the Library and other public spaces more energy efficient. In addition to the obvious aesthetic improvements, replacing CPUs (which use about 120 watts of power) with small black boxes called Pano Zero Client cubes (about five watts) is expected to save about $3,000 a year, according to Enterprise Technology and Infrastructure Manager Tim Yarbrough. During the hotter months of the year, the new equipment, produced by Pano Logic of Redwood City, Calif., should help reduce cooling costs as well.

“We talked about ways of improving energy efficiency at the Library,” Yarbrough explains. “Basically, we replaced 85 desktop systems with a zero client virtual desktop environment. It essentially takes the physical PC away and replaces it with a small black box.

“That cube gives you a presentation where you get your video, your keyboard and your mouse inter-activity, but the actual computer you are accessing is in the server room, running on a couple of servers and some storage.”

The Pano cubes are easily attached to the back of each monitor, conserving surface space. The setup includes the network cable, USB cables for mouse and keyboard, a video port and audio out for headphones.

How does it all work?

“Essentially, this little box talks to the server and has its own dedicated machine that it’s tied to,” Yarbrough says. “The user logs into this environment. They can interact with it, and when they’re done and they shut it down, that server on the back end – the actual virtual computer — restarts itself.

“Any changes done in that environment are lost, because it’s a non-persistent state. When it reboots, it loses that state and comes back up to the way it was originally and is ready for another user to log in.”

That feature provides much needed security, always an issue for a publicly-shared system. Yet another part of the attraction of the Pano cube: The user experience is pretty much identical to working with a desktop unit with a conventional CPU.

Asked how patrons have reacted, Werchan said the transition was virtually seamless.

“People for the most part were pretty much… unaffected,” he said.  “They carried on about their normal business.”

In addition to saving space and cutting down electricity usage, Pano cubes reduce maintenance costs. Image: friscogreenliving.com

From the maintenance perspective, however, the move to the Pano cube represents a dramatic change. Updates and repairs that previously were done on station-to-station basis have been centralized.

“The systems we had were old and needed to be replaced,” Yarbrough says. “From a repair perspective, we were replacing fans and other things on a regular basis.

“All these systems are housed on the server. If we need to make updates, we can take the system down and update directly there. They’re available the next day, as opposed to running around from this machine to that one.”

Original designs planned for 100 machines to run on the two servers. Currently, about 85 machines are operating throughout the Library, leaving room for expansion. The new technology is designed to be around for a while, too.

“The longevity on these should be much greater,” Yarbrough says. “There’s no reason you couldn’t maintain these for seven, eight years, maybe longer.”

Cooler, quieter,  more energy efficient – and essentially free. It’s another win-win for the city, making the Frisco Public Library an even more pleasant and environmentally friendly place to be.