By Auden Schendler, author of “Getting Green Done.”
On Christmas Eve 2009, the peak of the ski season in Aspen Snowmass, all was not quiet at the resort’s new flagship restaurant, Sam’s Smokehouse. At 10,600 feet in the Colorado Rockies, the weather can be extreme. On that night, things got brutal. It was minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and the wind was howling.
Unfortunately, heating equipment failed, so it wasn’t much warmer inside the restaurant (27 degrees), and as a result, two pipes froze solid and burst.
It was a calamity, because managers planned to serve barbecue to 300 people the next day, with thousands more expected for snacks, toe warming, and bathroom breaks.
The ostensible cause of the burst pipes was that the burner in the makeup air unit had gone out.* But the root cause of the problem was that the building’s mechanical systems simply didn’t work properly. And the harsh reality is that Sam’s is not unique. Almost no building mechanical systems operate as they’re supposed to. But nobody knows. Nobody checks. And life goes on.
“Broken” is Normal
The result is that the planet has a huge fleet of buildings that are badly built and running crappily. Fans run backwards. Vents remain open when they should be closed. Heaters run all summer. And this remains true for the life of the building””some 50-100 years. Most people accept this situation like they would a balky TV thirty years ago””smack it a few times and the channel comes in. That’s how these things work. But the inconvenience masks a broader issue. Buildings use tons of energy: 948 quadrillion BTUs in the U.S annually, to be precise, or the equivalent energy of 16 million Hiroshima sized bombs. This comes at staggering dollar cost and climate impact: in the U.S. at least, these structures are responsible for about a third of total greenhouse gas emissions every year. Can’t we do better?
At least half the answer is “No.” Buildings are mostly old, existing stock that was built to limited””or nonexistant””energy code. They are what they are, and you might put some lipstick on them, but in the end, they’re still pigs. Replacing them is out of the question, because it’s too expensive.
But the other half of the answer is “Yes.” Even a crappy building can be tuned and operated efficiently. My house””framed in 2 x 4s 50 years ago””is a good example. It’s inefficient, but I run it on very little energy by turning the heat off at night and making sure things run properly.
What I do in my old house illustrates two crucial elements that are missing in most commercial buildings. The first is energy use monitoring. The second is commissioning, a third party evaluation of the heating and cooling systems to make sure they are working to specifications.
Sam’s was actually slated for commissioning, but opened so late we had to delay the work. Uncommissioned, it became a prototype of how most of the buildings in the world operate.
Energy Monitoring: I am Six Tall
One of the problems is that we never know what’s going on at any given time. That means your building could be using ten times the power it needs, but nobody knows. To get at that, “Real time” energy monitoring””a sexy computer screen display of instantaneous building energy use””is considered state of the art in green building design these days. But it’s meaningless without a reference. What should the building be using? Without that data, it’s like telling someone your height is “six.” Six what? At Sam’s, we settled for econo-monitoring: we looked at the energy bills each month. We also had an ace up our sleeve: a computer model of the building that we could use as a baseline. It told us we were using twice the design energy. As they say in AA, admitting you have a problem is the first step. In this case, knowing we had a problem set us apart from the vast bulk of building managers. Now we were ready to ask why the building used much juice.*
Cutting a Bagel with a Chainsaw
At night, Sam’s runs two large barbecue smokers that give off “about three matches worth of smoke” according to August Hasz, of Resource Engineering Group, the commissioning firm. And to deal with that tiny amount of smoke, Sam’s ran the equivalent of three window fans all the time, with the heat on. Running big fans to vent heated air cost us a fortune. It was also patently unnecessary, like using a chainsaw to cut a bagel. (Think of the upside: you’ll never encounter a bagel you can’t deal with!) This seems insane, but it’s actually standard practice.
Energy is so cheap that engineers can oversize heating and cooling equipment by factors of two or three. Their clients never run out of hot water, and don’t know or care enough to complain.
At Sam’s, we were rare operational victims of oversized equipment. When the burner in the makeup air unit failed, we were still drawing in huge volumes of air that would normally be preheated. So the building froze.
“People were afraid of the building,” said Hasz. “It was so unreliable and working so horribly, people were scared to turn if off.” Managers bit their nails over the prospect of zero revenue during peak season. Snowcat drivers checked on the building through the night to make sure it was still warm.
Instead of offering refuge, Sam’s was serving up terror.
Commissioning to the Rescue
Hasz, as part of his commissioning work, figured out why the burner in the makeup unit kept failing””it was a manufacturing fault in the controls. He also identified a fix for the smokers: a six inch chimney pipe connected to an oversized bath fan. This enabled Sam’s to shut off the enormous kitchen exhaust fans at night, and therefore radically cut the need for the makeup air unit, itself the largest energy user in the building.
What else did the commissioning agent find?
- After the smoker retrofits, the kitchen hoods were now overventilating for the needs of the cooks. Solution: slow the exhaust and make-up air fans down by 20%: less cold air brought in means less gas burned to heat it. Meanwhile, slowing the fans by 20% saves 30% or more on fan energy.
- An electric unit heater in the storage room had toilet paper stacked all around and on it. Solution: move the toilet paper, potentially saving the building.
- A design flaw meant extra air was being pushed out through the storage room, with cold air coming in a louver, causing the heater with the toilet paper stacked on it to run all the time. Solution: board up the louver.
Sam’s restaurant is a niche building””a mountaintop restaurant at a ski resort””but the problems we found were generic to most buildings. Things were too big. Things ran too much. Things didn’t work right. Even the cost of the fix was prototypical: managers spent $30k on commissioning, about .3% of building cost and money that was part of the original construction budget. That investment resulted in $10,000 savings last year, a 33% return on investment.
This is fairly standard savings for commissioning, which studies have shown can save up to 40% in annual energy bills. Analysis by Southern California Edison showed that commissioning costs $.28 per square foot and saves anywhere between .3 and 3.4 kilowatt-hours per square foot. At the top end of that scale, that’s a 100% return on investment. What business wouldn’t make this standard practice?
Answer: most. While there is no data on what percentage of new buildings undergo commissioning, most experts, and anecdotal evidence, suggest it is very small. In the future, however, as scarcity and carbon regulation cause energy prices to climb, it will be easy to tell which businesses have implemented basic, obvious, cost effective measures like energy monitoring and commissioning: they still have the lights on.
Monitoring does more than tell you if your building is an energy hog or not. It also can tell you if equipment in your building is actually “On” when it should be “Off,” like Sam’s in the summer. Leaving equipment on is surprisingly commonplace. Monitoring also acts as an insurance policy: sometimes buildings run beautifully for years, but then something goes wrong (a stuck motor or vent, for example, or broken controls) and energy use get outs of control. Monitoring can alert you to such changes.
Notes:
* Makeup air units replace air vented through exhaust fans with warmed outside air.
* Monitoring does more than tell you if your building is an energy hog or not. It also can tell you if equipment in your building is actually “On” when it should be “Off,” like Sam’s in the summer. Leaving equipment on is surprisingly commonplace. Monitoring also acts as an insurance policy: sometimes buildings run beautifully for years, but then something goes wrong (a stuck motor or vent, for example, or broken controls) and energy use get outs of control. Monitoring can alert you to such changes.
- Auden Schendler is Vice President of sustainability at the Aspen Skiing Company.
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Here’s an obvious need for states (probably) or the federal government to require commissioning for all new buildings. It may well be a political non-starter in these times of straitened state budgets. On the other hand, as this posting (along with a host of prior analyses) shows, the cost will quickly be recouped.
This is a great guest column! It’s a case study in how we can “fix the world.” It also implicitly validates many of the things that Rocky Mountain Institute has been saying for years. When you remove inefficiencies, your equipment can work optimally. Removing the obstructing toilet paper is equivalent to straightening out pipes in facilities so you need smaller pumps to push material. And at aa certain point as you “right-size” components to provide the energy/service needed, you “tunnel through the cost barrier” and can downsize or eliminate expensive equipment. (Famously, “expensive” super-insulation in Amory Lovins’ Colorado mountain home/office meant that lights and human activity generated enough heat that it didn’t need a heating system.)
We’re starting to think differently about homes, offices, public accommodations and factories that often last 50-100 years. Obviously, structures have so much embedded energy and materials that analyzing and fixing them make so much sense. Old buildings can thereby become sources of negawatts and negagallons.
[Now the promotion for CalCars' "Big Fix" idea:] We also can expand our definition of the “built environment” to include large vehicles that far longer than 5-10 years as most people assume. If we partly or fully electrify as many as possible of our globe’s nearly one billion vehicles, we can get start producing negagallons there too. The technical solutions are there; when the financing is in place, gas-guzzler conversions can join building retrofits as a local-jobs-everywhere green industry. http://www.calcars.org/ice-conversions.html
Energy efficiency is the new opportunity in both new and existing buildings. The 2012 IECC building code calls for commissioning of HVAC systems in commercial buildings. http://www.energycodes.gov/status/2012_Final.stm
It’s not just the HVAC systems. Insulation, sealing and windows are inadequate more often than not. We also need to begin to install microprocessor useage controls. These are all cost effective and simple steps, and there are USG incentives. Most building owners still won’t do these things, and would rather make them look better from the outside. Don’t ask me why.
I just returned from visiting a friend in Anchorage, Ak. Their house was cold and yet the heater was almost always running. A quick survey on my part revealed a seldom used large wood stove with an 8″ stack to the out doors. Also the damper for the stack could not be closed completely and a continual draft came thru the room to the heater intake. My first attempt was to rap the stove with a large old blanket and insulate the stack with left over bubble rap. It was night and -10F out side. The improvement was immediate. The next day we stuffed a large plastic garbage bag up the flue with a bright red reminder ribbon hanging down and sign tied to it, as well as another over the outside stack and tied.
Cost of modifications, ~$0.20.
Fuel savings? Too early to get a number but a dollar or more a day would be a safe guess.
I have worked in a variety of buildings and the HVAC in all of them were horrible.
One of the root problems is that our tax code encourages businesses to lease instead of own buildings. As a result, the businesses using the buildings don’t have much control over them, and the building owners don’t want to spend money to fix them because it’s not their problem – they don’t pay the electric bill.
Burning Down the House
My favoite subject. I design and build HVAC control systems for large commercial buildings.
Individual laboratory Fume Hoods use as much energy as three typcial homes. I am currently installing a test system for the University of New Hampshire that will reduce this waste by a substantial amount.
I live in a near net zero energy house that uses 1/10 the energy of the best energy star house. It is now possible to build ultra-low energy homes using standard building materials readily available at your local building supply, using standard construction techniques, using local labor and for standard cost per square foot.
On the other side, I work in a small office, I doubt the walls have any insulation and the draft at the exterior wall is frigid. We all have windows and I cannot get my co-workers to turn off the lights or computers. Ironic?
In the late 80′s I worked for a company that performed energy conservation as a prime business model. We would calculate the BTU/SQFT/Year (EUI or Energy Use Index) and often discover that the client was using 350-400 btu/sqft/year. Utility bills for these clients was often in the high 6 figures. For an investment of $100-$150,000 we could reduce the EUI from 400 to 250 for a yearly saving often in excess of $100,000. The man that owned that company would make millions.
#7 Christopher, did you mean to say 350,000 to 400,000 Btu/sf/year? I use Btu’s per square foot per heating degree day (Btu/sf/hdd) as a measure of efficiency. This allows one to compare buildings located in different climates.
I need a microprocessor telling me when to open the window?
Am sitting in an 1873 farmhouse all warm and snug and using less energy than the Gold LEED neighbors. Everyone involved in the operation of this building is on the same page. We use intelligence and common sense. We pay attention to details.
Details count. A balloon that has just a tiny hole in it stops being a balloon quickly. Everyone understands that. Now try to get anyone to believe the same fluid dynamics would apply to a house. If you can, congratulations, your heat bill just dropped faster than that microprocessor can crash.
All the classic traditional systems work fine if you do them right. Pay your craftsmen. Inspect their work as if you cared and then pay them again to do it over. Paying structural engineers and architects to draw pretty pictures and then letting the contractors use cheapest available labor, letting the building owner hire his brother-in-law with the drinking problem as property manager is the usual plan.
Did I mention the 1873 house has six fireplaces? All with drumtight dampers. Automatic dampers presumably as old as the house. First stick of kindling opens them, last ember dies, they close. I’ve no idea how they work. The chimneysweep figured it out and says they’ll keep going forever. That sort of craft has always existed.
1979 to 1982 I sprayed urethane foam industrial roofs. Put 100,000 square feet of seamless exterior insulation on the roof of a single-story building and windows doors loading docks do not matter — you have created a cave. There are buildings I insulated 30 years back that have zero heating cost and zero cooling cost. Does anyone care? Does anyone notice? Back when I sprayed the process was near technically impossible but we did it anyway. It’s simple now and the product has a Class I fire rating. Impossible to sell. People want !@#$%^&* microprocessors.
As someone familiar with mechanical engineering, I concur that most US buildings are poorly designed energy hogs. This occurs due to a host of systemic failures, including the cultural concept of unlimited, cheap fuels along with large historic federal fossil and uranium subsidies. Buildings were not “designed with climate” but instead quickly assembled for profit with the user then spending decades of wasted resources. “Modern” building construction has been in a dark age. Now we find ourselves locked in to a national unsustainable building stock, with many sitting vacant today from “unregulated finance” to boot. And some perfectly sound structures that could be retrofitted are demolished when they don’t fit some perceived desire, further wasting resources.
“We are faced with insurmountable opportunities.” All we seem to need is a new government with good sustainable policy across the board (yea sure). In the meantime prepare for oil/gas/coal/nukes at the equivalent of $200/bbl not including climate costs, which are immeasurable.
What if there were a connection between energy providers and the government insuring that the government not involve itself with saving wasted energy because that might eat into the profits of the energy provider?
And what if a similar connection existed between the building mortgage owners (presumably they are the real owners of the energy wasting buildings) and the energy providers to maintain a hands-off approach to energy conservation?
I could believe in more hermetically sealed houses and buildings, that are super well insulated if the building products manufacturers removed all products that out-gas formaldehyde and other toxic substances. As it stands, a draft might waste energy, but it insures fresh air is entering the building which I count as a good thing.
It just goes to show, yet again, that we could get ourselves out of this pickle if only we used our brains. Unfortunately, grotesque energy inefficiency, like ‘planned obsolescence’ and endless, neoplastic, economic growth, are bedrock principles underlying the global religion of market fundamentalist capitalism. And if we remember our catechism properly, climate disruption, oceanic acidification, oceanic anoxic ‘dead-zones’ etc, are simply ‘externalities’ that are automatically cast into the outer darkness as sacrilegious distractions from the Holy Task of Profit Maximisation. If we wish to see any future for our species the capitalists must go, and a sustainable, steady state economy established, and we must radically reduce our consumption, particularly in the rich countries, while diverting the trillions wasted on weapons to research on human welfare and global social sustainability.
answer to catman306
Counter flow heat exchangers are an accepted answer to the need for fresh air exchange. The heat recovery is very high 90%+???
Auden, great write up. It is great to see Aspen Skiing Company sharing their stumbles and trials as a real estate owner/developer. Too many owners are not willing to share their mistakes, but SkiCo is turning theirs not only into success for themselves but getting the word out to others.
It is also good to see people talking about the reality of buildings (both new and existing) needing commissioning. At Resource Engineering Group we continually come across owners that don’t believe they should have to pay for commissioning. Understandably, their stance is- “hey, I paid for a system that works, the general and mechanical contractors say it does, the buildings feels fine… why should I pay some one else to check it?” We design and commission systems from single family residences on up thru a 100k ft2 commercial buildings and I have never ever commissioned a system and not found something significantly wrong with the install. Even with great contractors, it is just a fact of life. HVAC systems require the GC, pipe fitter, plumber, tin installer, electrician, controls installer, and possibly fire suppression contractor all to coordinate and not drop a single ball. A tough order on a typical job site.
Also, I second BBHY’s comments above. Leased/rented facilities are very tricky to tackle- who pays the bill?
Burning Down the House
Building Energy 2011 sponsored by New England Sustainable Energy Association. http://www.nesea.org/be11/ Look for the programs led by Marc Rosenbaum or Katrin Klinkenborg.
Doug #8: Yes! Your exactly write. We all need an editor. EUI is in thousands of BTU per square foot per year. MBTU/sqft/year. Factoring for number of people or heating degree days is useful. You might also calculate energy use in terms of tons or carbon. That and not energy consumed is the issue of the next 100 years.
For instance, a bit less than half the energy used by my home is generated CO2 free (almost) by the PV panels. I also have no way to calculate the energy contributed by the solar hot water system. But it is CO2 free. We are having problems with the solar hot water. I expect when we get that resolved the energy consumption at the electric meter will drop by 20-30%.
The problems with the solar hot water is a case in point about energy waste. The installer did a lousy job, the unit design is less than perfect, lack of instructions on how to maintain the unit, etc. The average citizen would not notice that it was not working. Even with the advanced knowledge that I have I am having a hard time identifying the problem and getting it fixed. The technology needs to improve an order of magnitude before it is ready for the average consumer.
And to be fully honest the house has an EUI of 21 (21,000 btu/sqft/year) which is a fifth of an EnergyStar house, not a tenth as I stated. A bit less than half that energy is provided by PV panels.
http://www.passivehouse.us/passiveHouse/PassiveHouseInfo.html
The folks at Passive House offer a rigorous energy standard for home construction. They allow 4500 btu/sqft/year for heating. My house uses about twice that. The standard does not factor for either climate or number of occupants.
The Passive House standard does one fascinating thing. They factor for primary energy use, not final meter use, but primary source energy consumed. 3-4 units of energy are consumed for every unit of energy that is measured by the utility at the end user. My house used less than 2000KWH from the utility company last year (6 million btu) but 18-24 million btu were burned so that I could enjoy that 2000KWH.
Finally, if the appliances that consumed the electric energy were 10% efficient then I burned 20 million btu of primary energy to get 0.6 million BTU of useful work. And the actual numbers are probably not that good.
Our energy habits are morally corrupt. (I can’t call them criminal because it is not illegal to waste energy.) 100 years from now we will be viewed through the same lense as slave holding, cotton farmers. (Even that analogy fails miserably. We still hold Washington and Jefferson in high esteem and both were slave holders of the first order.) Destroying the environment so that we can enjoy unlimited energy use is moral corruption of the highest order. Especially when we have the ability to both preserve the environment and prosper. Someday soon we will all be making the excuse, “But I didn’t know! I was just doing what everyone else did! I didn’t know!”
We can both prosper and leave the environment better than it was given to us.
My last job was as maintenance manager for a property management firm in Northern California. The properties were 80% residential and 20 light commercial properties. Almost without exception these properties had horrible energy profiles. Most were uninhabitable on a summer day an hour after the air conditioning system had been turned off. Insulation was poorly installed, damaged or nonexistent. Metal-framed, single paned windows are common. HVAC units average 20+ years old. Detached or loose ducting is the norm. Water heaters average 15 years old where a unit changed out at 8 years has a foot of calcium gel in the tank. Most roofs are black. Almost none are properly vented. Moisture ventilation of bathrooms, laundry rooms and kitchens was haphazard and results in frequent winter mold blooms. Essentially, I can point out possible energy retrofits from the sidewalk of almost every building in town.
Simply raising fuel and electricity costs is a poor tactic as tenants do not have the finances, skills or knowledge to make good choices as to how to save energy. Frequently tenant tactics result in building damage of one sort or another as they burn pallets and plastic in gas-only fireplaces, tape plastic to the interior of windows (causes mold), turn off heating and vent fans and then suffer as moisture condenses on exterior walls (more mold).
Any real plan for effective building energy retrofits would require block-by-block, building-by-building inspections by qualified inspectors/engineers and then carefully supervised installations of retrofit equipment. To say this would require massive government oversight and subsidy is a huge understatement. It can’t be done in the current political climate.
Some sort of open-source building retrofit flowchart, checklist and wiki needs to be created. To my knowledge this kind of information resides largely in the heads of individuals and isn’t organized and/or codified in a way that the average person can understand it. LEED is a sad joke in that respect. Can anybody point to anything of the sort?
Burning Down the House
The Federal Bureau of Prisons took possession of a new max security unit in Berlin NH in May 2010. My company was hired to install the HVAC controls. We worked with a balancing agent and commissioning agent to verify that all systems met contract specifications. The prison will not recieve inmates for at least another 6 months, or a year after completion.
The buildings are empty and the facility is being operated as if it were occupied. The utility bill must be $50,000 plus. I could have easily made adjustments to the HVAC system and reduced that cost and the carbon footprint by half…….
Pangolin wrote: “Can anybody point to anything of the sort?”
I found the same lack of information on methods when I searched online a few months ago. Of course, I was merely curious and didn’t spend much time looking.
But I think there’s very little online, because the solid information is being held proprietary in service of the large profits expected from retrofitting old buildings.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1666282/report-us-green-building-market-will-balloon-to-1735-billion-by-2015
@Pangolin (post #17) – private industry and some small national organizations are ramping up with best practices for retrofit procedures. Here is one I refer to often, although lacking greatly in detail:
http://www.hprcenter.org/best-practices
And our very own gubmint has a few attempts at the matter, but I’m not too impressed with their meddling hands imposing enough restrictions so as to never get the work done. Here are two references to their current work:
http://ducts.lbl.gov/HVACRetrofitguide.html
and http://www1.eere.energy.gov/wip/pdfs/workforce_guidelines_home_energy_upgrades.pdf
As for industrial applications, I haven’t found much at all.
I’m totally with you, a Wiki is what’s needed; a consensus-based location for all things energy retrofit. Do it! Take it on! I’m too busy :p