Building Energy Resilience

Over the last year, I have become the proud owner of an energy efficient home. Designed and built from scratch, based on passive house principles by a team of local building professionals, construction is well underway, and the house will be completed by the end of the year.

One of the first things I became aware of when I joined Cx Associates is that sustainability is a way of thinking. I learned efficiency and judicious use of resources can be approached on many different levels, from choosing a more efficient clothes dryer, to finding alternatives for drying clothes, such as line or rack drying. All efforts toward sustainability are important, and a large impact can often be had for little effort and inconvenience. Multiplied by dozens or even hundreds and thousands of people, a seemingly small change can go a long way.

This is the third and final post in a series focused on the connection between energy efficiency and sound control. Actually, the choice of sound control is somewhat arbitrary, and the topic could easily have been energy efficiency and temperature control, energy efficiency and lighting design, or energy efficiency and industrial process.

This is the second in a series of posts focused on the connection between energy efficiency and sound control. It may seem intuitive that efficient mechanical systems will also be quiet mechanical systems. However, it generally makes sense from cost and performance standpoints to deliberately design with both in mind.

What does sound control have to do with energy efficient design? This blog post is the first in a three part series that will explore the intersection of sound and energy efficiency in existing buildings. My early experience as an applications engineer in mechanical systems noise control made me aware of the connection between the built environment and equipment energy use. System airflow requirements and the impact of total added pressure drop of sound control solutions are primary design variables for a noise control engineer. Full scale HVAC aero-acoustic laboratory testing is an integral component of sound control design.

Anyone involved in the Measurement and Verification (M&V) of building energy savings has encountered Stratified Random Sampling (SRS), a statistical tool used to handle the huge volume of data from the large number of projects and measures in a typical building energy research effort. From calibrated energy modeling to program evaluation and from the field through to the whitepaper, the use of applied statistical principles will simplify and improve the accuracy and defensibility of your M+V work.

Project-specific energy efficiency baselines, where the starting point for building efficiency is adjusted based on knowledge from our past successes, will become the norm as the energy efficiency market becomes more sophisticated. You read it here first.