Building Energy Resilience

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.

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.

We have posted several times about the importance of building control systems in achieving efficient building performance. In particular, building control graphics screens are a critical interface for understanding, operating, and maintaining building systems. Through my work in commissioning building systems, I have found opportunities to improve the effectiveness of the control graphics screens provided to clients. The following are a few observations and recommendations that I would like to share:

We were recently approached by a client inquiring about whether we were able to perform a water consumption analysis for their large campus. The client is looking for ways to reduce the campus’ water consumption. This type of work varies for different buildings depending on how the water is used. With this in mind, we needed to construct a unique scope of work in order to develop a plan that could be implemented and be successful.

Building commissioning (Cx) can be a useful risk management tool for facility managers and owners. Incorporating risk management in building Cx requires an understanding of three basic elements: threats, vulnerabilities, and associated risks. Risks characterize the likelihood of vulnerabilities being affected by threats. In a risk management process, once risks are defined they are prioritized for the development of risk reduction strategies. Building Cx provides unique risk reduction and risk management opportunities for facility managers and owners.

In a previous blog post, I discussed the features of the new Energy Star Portfolio Manager, a free online tool for benchmarking your building’s energy usage. Recently a client introduced me to another online benchmarking tool called Wegowise. This client has been successfully using Wegowise for their multi-family buildings. They started using it before multi-family was included in Portfolio Manager, and continue to use it because they like the easy to use interface, the automated features and how their building’s energy usage is displayed in a simple way that is easy to understand/analyze.

We spent last Thanksgiving in the Philadelphia area with my wife’s family, as we typically do every year. Though it’s not our usual habit, on Black Friday we ventured out to the local Target Store to do some shopping. As I recall, our purpose was to stock up on snacks for our toddler for the trip back to Vermont--it definitely was not to do holiday shopping on the most notoriously crazy shopping day of the year! While the trip to Target was fairly mundane, unbeknownst to us, as we swiped our bank debit cards to pay at checkout, our card information became unsecure in a complex data breach orchestrated from half a world away, reportedly in Eastern Europe and Russia.

Here at Cx Associates, we are actively searching for ways to use less paper in our commissioning process and around the office. When it is feasible, I try to complete any and all reading, researching, or note taking directly on my computer. My pursuit of going paperless is never entirely successful, but utilizing a tablet in the field has been helpful. Rather than print out drawings, specifications and other project documents, I generally download everything to one of the office iPads prior to my visit. If you haven’t already, check out my colleague Ben Fowler’s blog posts about popular apps we use on a regular basis. There are specific apps designed for reading and marking up PDF documents, as well as many others that can make a paperless approach more appealing.