More Than a Job: The Hands-On Engineering Opportunity at Garden Spot Village

Written by Juanita Fox, director of media experiences and storytelling

When people think about careers in senior living, they often picture caregiving, dining, life enrichment or administration. At Garden Spot Communities, there’s another kind of opportunity quietly taking shape—one that involves hands-on work with a sophisticated combined heat and power system few organizations ever have the chance to operate.

A System Built to Last—and to Learn From

Director of Campus Operations Matt Stoltzfus says systems like this are most often found in places built for the long haul—schools, hospitals, universities and military installations. They require a serious investment and a long view. At Garden Spot Village, the investment is not only in infrastructure, but also in people and the kind of technical knowledge that is uncommon in a senior living setting.

At the heart of the system is a large natural gas engine, similar in scale and complexity to what you might find in heavy industrial equipment. Paired with a generator that produces roughly 1,141 kW of power, the system captures heat that would otherwise be wasted and uses it to help heat—and, through an absorption chiller, cool—the campus. It also connects with the regional utility, which means the team has to understand not only the equipment itself, but also the standards and safeguards that come with operating at this level.

A Rare Chance to Get Inside the Machine

For the Garden Spot Village team, the complexity has created opportunity. Stoltzfus says staff have leaned into the challenge of learning something new and unusually sophisticated. It is not every day that someone in facilities or campus operations gets to understand the inner workings of a microgrid-scale power and heat recovery system. For many team members, it is the kind of experience they never expected to find in senior living.

Facilities Systems Specialist Scott Mohler, who helped bring the system online, remembers both the excitement and the learning curve of being part of a true first for Garden Spot Village. The process came with real challenges, including a construction setback when the pad being built for the system collapsed and had to be dug out and redone. Commissioning brought its own tense moments, including nights when the team shut down power across the entire campus and waited to see everything come back online safely.

From Uncertainty to Ownership

Work like this naturally comes with some uncertainty at first. Stoltzfus says the system felt intimidating to some team members in the beginning. But over time, familiarity built confidence. Confidence led to ownership. And ownership has become a quiet source of satisfaction for the people responsible for keeping the system running well.

Expertise That Resonates with the Community

That expertise has also created unexpected points of connection. Chief Operating Officer Steve Muller has described hallway conversations with residents who spent their careers in related fields and are naturally curious about the engine, the generator and the microgrid concept. For staff, the work is not only technical. It becomes part of the larger Garden Spot story—a place where knowledge, curiosity and community often intersect.

An Uncommon Career Opportunity in Senior Living

For team members at Garden Spot Village, the CHP system is more than routine maintenance. It is a chance to build real expertise in power generation, thermal recovery and microgrid operations—skills more often associated with large institutional or industrial settings—while doing meaningful work in the context of a close-knit community. It is technical, challenging and, for the people who work with it every day, deeply meaningful work.