Building Energy Resilience

Before joining Cx Associates I worked as a sales engineer in western New York, with a specialty in Variable Refrigerant Flow and Ductless Split systems. With the new popularity of these systems across the country there are still many questions facilities managers, engineers, and contractors have regarding their cold weather performance. There are several important aspects of these systems to keep in mind before deciding whether they are right for your facility or project that requires cold weather heating.

The least utilized part of the building commissioning process is the act of going back to a completed project and proving the monetary value of the commissioning work. This is an added cost but is very important for the building owner as well as the commissioning agent to ensure changes were implemented correctly. Fortunately, we have many affordable options these days to measure the energy consumption of our building equipment before and after our commissioning work. Armed with this real-life performance data, we can present the owner with hard evidence of the value of fine-tuning a building’s mechanical system. We recently did such a review of two buildings which underwent building commissioning in the past 18 months. By analyzing the data, we found savings for these buildings range from 18-30% with relatively short payback periods.

I recently had a meeting with one of my favorite long-term clients. We met to discuss some upcoming work, and while there, I poked around in the chiller plant mechanical room to see how things were running. We were involved in design review and commissioning for the new chiller plant, and have been impressed with its efficiency. It’s a water cooled chiller with high efficiency, magnetic bearing compressors and all the bells and whistles. In the past, we’ve metered consistently high performance out of the chiller plant as a whole, saving the client many thousands of dollars per year in electrical savings.

My business partner, Matt Napolitan and I each spent 10 years working at major, international engineering firms. I worked for nationally ranked 11^th Syska Hennessy Group in their San Francisco office and Matt worked for 14^th ranked Buro Happold out of their New York office. We now operate a 10-person engineering consulting firm in Burlington, Vermont. We know both large, big-city engineering and local, Vermont engineering.

Let’s be honest with ourselves: when it comes to estimating the potential energy savings of proposed energy efficiency/conservation measures (EEMs/ECMs), there is uncertainty. Assumptions and uncontrolled variables can make or break the preliminary estimates for an EEM/ECM. For example, a $5,000 lighting controls EEM/ECM may offer annual energy savings of $1,000/year (5 year simple payback) if a facility is unoccupied for 4,000 hours per year, or only $750/year (7.5 year simple payback) if the same facility is unoccupied for only 3,000 hours per year. Unknown and uncontrolled variables, such as building occupancy and use, introduce considerable uncertainty to estimates of energy savings.

When it comes to enjoying the many positive features of an enclosed parking garage, most users will not think about the type of ventilation system in place. But an enclosed parking garage poses an issue with carbon monoxide (CO), a very harmful toxic gas that is created when “fuels burn incompletely – most vehicles have an internal combustion engine where this occurs”[1]. Known as a “silent killer,” CO has no odor or color, but can very quickly poison a person before they even sense anything is wrong. Because of this risk, it’s especially important to make sure there is a proper ventilation system in any enclosed area where there is a potential for formation of CO. In this blog post, I will discuss the pros and cons of two current system designs that are typically used. When an engineer designs a ventilation system for an enclosed garage, they carefully calculate how much CFM is required based on square footage and quantity of operating vehicles. Depending on climate and location, the applicable standard/code for ventilation must be carefully followed to ensure the minimum requirements are met.

The software business and the commercial construction industry wouldn’t seem to have a lot in common. Just start with the workers: geeks in cubes versus people in hard hats and steel-toed boots. But going beyond the obvious differences, both industries operate with many of the same challenges and pressures. Let's start with the similarities and then look at how the building commissioning process may offer valuable lessons for the software industry.

There seems to be a parade of “smart” devices in the marketplace today, and residential HVAC providers are offering new opportunities to be “smart.” Pretense aside, there are some interesting benefits and risks associated with recent offerings for residential HVAC monitoring.

Energy efficiency is a tremendous opportunity that we are squandering at the federal level. While many states have adopted aggressive energy savings goals and have committed the necessary resources to advance both policy and practice toward meeting those goals, little federal action has been taken to advance building and transportation efficiency. The ACEEE’s 2014 International Energy Efficiency Score Card ranks the US near the bottom of industrialized economies in efficiency. The countries that are doing worse than we are include Russia, Brazil and Mexico.

In a recent blog post, “The Benefits of an ASHRAE Level 1 Energy Audit,” I discussed the process of performing an ASHRAE Level 1 energy audit, which is the first step in the LEED accreditation process for Existing Buildings (LEED EB). The Level 1 report is used to determine whether there is enough energy saving opportunities to proceed with LEED EB accreditation. In order to receive an energy credit in the official LEED EB application, however, an ASHRAE Level 2 energy audit is required. The Level 2 audit uses energy surveying and an engineering analysis to provide an even more detailed breakdown of how a building is performing; going deeper into the analysis of the Level 1 measures and identifying additional measures to improve the efficiency and functionality of the building. The Level 2 report details the opportunities to such a degree that actual decisions on implementation can be made and the LEED EB credit can be realized.