Changing the Sustainability Game in Philadelphia

Posted June 14, 2013 By Stan Gatland and has no comments yet.

GridSTARHouseBackPhiladelphia is making great strides when it comes to sustainability. The world’s largest green building event — Greenbuild 2013 — will attract more than 30,000 building industry leaders to Philadelphia in November. The city has received national recognition for its recycling programs. New codes and tax credits are fostering more sustainable building practices. And, there’s a hotbed of research and innovation underway at The Navy Yard in Philadelphia.

With our North American headquarters just outside of Philadelphia and as a sustainable manufacturer, we fully embrace the city’s push to become “America’s Greenest City”. We have invested time and resources into a game-changing, smart-grid project that can move the needle on Net Zero Energy in construction.

Led by a collaboration of researchers, manufacturers and economic development officials, the GridSTAR Center will roll out in three phases — the GridSTAR Net Zero Energy Demonstration Structure, a solar training center and an electric vehicle (EV) charging station. These buildings are powered by an energy storage system that captures the power and disperses it as needed.

For more than a year, I have been involved in the planning and construction of the Net Zero Energy Demonstration Structure, which will be a hub for CertainTeed Building Science testing and research on energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality. The structure also offers a valuable platform to further understand and optimize how our products work together — including photovoltaic roofing, solar reflective roofing, fiberglass and spray foam insulation, foundation drainage and waterproofing systems, insulated vinyl siding, water resistive barrier and gypsum board.

From a broader perspective, the GridSTAR project is a testament to the power of public-private partnerships. In this case, the project includes a consortium of representatives from Penn State, the U.S. Department of Energy, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, DTE Energy and five leading building product manufacturers.

This truly is a landmark project that will influence how we build and power our homes in the future. If you plan to attend GreenBuild 2013 in Philadelphia, I recommend that you take the tour of the Navy Yard which includes this project. It is truly changing the sustainability game in Philadelphia.

Watch for future blogs on this project as we begin performance testing of the systems.

 

About Stan Gatland

Stan Gatland is Manager, Building Science Technology for CertainTeed Corporation

NAHB International Builders’ Show – Where New Products and Learning Collide

Posted January 22, 2013 By Lucas Hamilton and has no comments yet.
CertainTeed booth at IBS 2013

CertainTeed booth at IBS 2013

I am in Las Vegas for the National Association of Home Builders International Builders’ Show 2013.  I truly enjoy this show because it is a great opportunity to ‘kick the tires’ on products and learn about best practices taking places in the build community. 

With the new 2012 Building Codes that are starting to be adopted by states, it is critical that build professionals know the changes to the code requirements where they are building. It is also important to hear about best practices for achieving airtight assemblies and the best solutions for achieving maximum energy efficiency in the building envelope.

For IBS 2013, CertainTeed is focused on building knowledge. To assist with this, CertainTeed is incorporating in its booth (C2126) a Builder Resource Center making available building science and technical experts to share best practices but also to answer questions from show participants. If you come to our Resource Center you will be eligible to win a full day consultation by a building scientist on your construction site. 

At the booth, we will also have technical experts hosting “Ask the Expert” interactive sessions centered on building science, roofing, insulation, siding, gypsum and foundations. With the extension of the Energy Tax Credit as part of the fiscal cliff negotiations, contractors and developers who construct or renovate “dwelling units” (apartments, condos or single-family homes) that meet certain energy efficiency standards have access to a tax credit of up to $2000.

If you are attending IBS, make sure to stop by booth C2126 and pick our brains. I guarantee you will have a great learning experience as well as a fun time.

About Lucas Hamilton

Lucas Hamilton is Manager, Building Science Applications for CertainTeed

Don’t Forget the End Users When Building for Energy Efficiency

Posted November 30, 2012 By Lucas Hamilton and has no comments yet.

While at Greenbuild 2012 I was asked “What do you think is the most critical factor in ensuring a healthy, sustainable built environment?” My answer was posted on our Blog but there is more I want to say about this so here we go!

Users or occupants of high efficiency buildings need to understand and be a partner in the process because  ultimately they influence the  success or failure of a building’s efficiency over time. For example, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for Homes will give you credit for and requires Energy Star performance which means certain insulation levels, certain air tightness and certain efficiencies on the mechanical systems (among other issues). The energy efficiency of the building is based upon a combination of highly efficient equipment and permanent passive systems.

When the active system wears out, if the consumers don’t appreciate the importance of the efficiency of that system on the overall performance of the habitat they are unlikely to take that into consideration when they have to replace equipment.  They can go from a high efficiency piece of equipment that made their sustainable building sing beautifully and perform wonderfully and stick in something that is on sale or is perhaps promoted by their contractor but with a whole different efficiency rating.  Now the building goes from being a Prius to being a Hummer simply because the driver wasn’t told the difference between the two.

In sustainability circles we often talk about “the Prius effect”.  This comes from the engagement of the driver with the car.  Once the driver understands the savings due to the offset of the electrical to the fuel and you give them real-time feedback, they began to drive against the machine to improve the efficiency. The build community needs to develop dashboards or other tools for high efficiency buildings so that end users can see the benefits provided by the systems.  That buy-in is critical to sustaining efficiency over the life cycle of the building.

There is no point in doing a sustainable building for someone unless you teach and show them how to maintain it. That is one aspect I especially admire about the Living Building Challenge. The Beauty petal has components which include inspiration and education. Couldn’t we all use a little more of both?

About Lucas Hamilton

Lucas Hamilton is Manager, Building Science Applications for CertainTeed

What if We Could Make Buildings Sweat?

Posted July 26, 2012 By Lucas Hamilton and has no comments yet.

Lucas Hamilton

Lucas Hamilton is Manager, Building Science Applications for CertainTeed Corporation

Following up on the previous post “Can We Design Buildings for Heat and Cooling that Mimic the Human Body”, a similar question popped into my head regarding making buildings sweat.

The evaporation of water is an endothermic process that cools a surface. Evaporation of sweat from the skin surface has a cooling effect due to this phenomenon. Hence, in hot weather, or when the individual’s muscles heat up due to exertion, more sweat is produced in response to your rising internal thermostat. Why couldn’t this same process be applied to buildings?

What if there was a way to take the condensation that often occurs at sunrise, capture it and re-release it as needed.  Could we create materials, while not letting moisture intrude into the building, that could capture the moisture that naturally occurs and evaporate it off in the daytime when the sun hit the walls to cool it off?  

Obviously this would be a benefit in climates where we are using a great deal of cooling. We don’t want this occurring in cold climates for a variety of reasons. That’s a discussion for another day.

Are there any ideas out there?  When people get hot, they sweat and it cools them off.  Is it possible to apply this concept to buildings?

About Lucas Hamilton

Lucas Hamilton is Manager, Building Science Applications for CertainTeed

Can We Design Buildings for Heat and Cooling that Mimic the Human Body

Posted July 13, 2012 By Lucas Hamilton and has 2 comments.

Lucas Hamilton

Lucas Hamilton is Manager, Building Science Applications for CertainTeed Corporation

I spend lots of time thinking about buildings. Sad; I know. Lately I have been wondering how we wound up in such a confusing state. It’s like looking under your car hood. Have you looked under your hood lately? It looks like a building design. Who in their right mind would have started out to design such a complicated mess? No wonder we need so many building scientists and we pay a hundred bucks an hour to get our cars fixed. Can we step back for a minute?

Thermal comfort in the built environment needn’t be so complicated. If we could start from scratch and try to make buildings comfortable based upon our own organic experience, what would we do? I live in Philadelphia.  If I go outside in the winter and try to passively stay comfortable – passively meaning to not use any outside energy sources – I would use lots of layers of clothing, would zip up tight and cover my skin.

Coincidentally that is what we require in our cold climate building codes.  Lots of layers of clothing means R-value. When you wear lots of layers of clothing you are trapping gas inside layers.  The gas is the insulation – gas gives you resistance to conductive energy heat flow – that’s R-value.  So when you are wearing lots of layers you are wearing R-value. When we say zip up – that’s getting air tight. We finally woke up and added that one to the cold and mixed climate codes as well.

The problem comes in the summertime. To stay cool, you would take off those layers, wear light colors and try to get air flow around you.  You would wear airy fabrics to release as much heat from your body as possible and light colors which don’t get hot in the sun. If you were stuck wearing lots of layers and were zipped up tight, you would have to blow cold fresh air into that outfit to stay comfortable. Our goal should be not to do that. Remember, passive technologies rule and active technologies cost $$$.

We need to find ways to help a building be warm in the winter and stay cool to begin with in the summer. I am looking for changes to our practices that will enable us to do to buildings what we do to ourselves. How would you build your building differently?

If you can’t strip off all the layers of clothing the very least you will do is unzip so can we figure out a way to unzip our buildings? I know we want to be air tight in the winter but can we figure out a way to use air to remove surface heat in the summer? I think ventilated claddings may be one answer.

Can you think of some others? To go back to the car analogy, let’s stop bolting more stuff onto the internal combustion engine to make it more efficient and drop in an electric motor. It needn’t be so complicated.

About Lucas Hamilton

Lucas Hamilton is Manager, Building Science Applications for CertainTeed

Categories:
 Building Science, HVAC

Can Mapping Urban Albedo Help Control Urban Heat Island Effect?

Posted April 17, 2012 By Lucas Hamilton and has 1 comment.
 

Lucas Hamilton

Lucas Hamilton is Manager, Building Science Applications for CertainTeed Corporation

Urban temperatures are rising and it has a great deal to do with the types of materials we choose to construct our habitat. Historically, our construction materials have been great absorbers of infrared and near infrared solar radiation. As our urban centers have grown they have accumulated an excess potential for heat absorption which has put them out of balance compared to more rural areas. This is what is called the heat island effect.  The good news is that every urban surface exposed to the sun becomes a potential location to reverse this process and restore the balance.

While researching maps of Philadelphia (my home) for a previous blog on billing property owners for impervious surfaces that contribute to the rainwater run-off pouring into co-mingled storm/sewer systems, I came across the map used to identify these properties by the City (http://www.phila.gov/water/swmap). 

The interactive map shows the relative water permeability of surfaces delineating between general materials such as roofing, parking areas, roads, and open spaces. I started to think about how we could use similar technology to identify the albedo of the surfaces – a material’s natural ability to reflect or absorb radiant heat gain from solar radiation.

Some creative person (with a lot of time on their hands) should be able to use tools like Google Earth, identify the nature of the surfaces they see, and draw from a database of Solar Reflective Index (SRI) values to identify the potential targets for improvement. How can we influence global cooling?  By using technology that is available to identify the albedo of existing buildings. Once identified, municipalities can incentivize people to change to cool roofs or to living roofs where appropriate. The city could encourage the re-planting of native trees in unusable areas. There are all kinds of things each property could do to make a difference.

I would love to hear what other ideas may be out there to address this issue.  Any takers?

About Lucas Hamilton

Lucas Hamilton is Manager, Building Science Applications for CertainTeed

Living Building Challenge Alive and Rising in Seattle

Posted March 21, 2012 By Lucas Hamilton and has no comments yet.

Lucas Hamilton

Lucas Hamilton is Manager, Building Science Applications for CertainTeed Corporation

In the early days of my blogging, I talked about the Living Building Challenge and the early adoption taking place in Portland, Oregon. The Challenge aims to certify green buildings around seven performance areas: site, water, energy, health, materials, equity and beauty. It is so comprehensive that it is “whole-istic”. Sorry.

An exciting “Living Building” project is currently underway in Seattle that was highlighted in U.S News on MSNBC  on March 20, 2012. This could be a true showcase for the ultimate in sustainable office buildings. There is also a slide presentation in the link that is worth reviewing.

Denis Hayes, who co-founded Earth Day with Gaylord Nelson, now heads the Seattle-based Bullitt Foundation.  He is partnering with architect Jason McLennan, who is CEO of the International Living Future Institute on this project.

With everything from harvested rainwater to geothermal wells, solar energy and lots of natural light, this building has no parking lot on the premises but is accessible by bus, bike or on foot. One day this could truly become the standard for new urban construction but in the meantime it can also provide valuable data to fuel the movement on retrofitting existing buildings.

Great project with great potential!

About Lucas Hamilton

Lucas Hamilton is Manager, Building Science Applications for CertainTeed

The NAHB International Builders’ Show – A Constant in a Changing Landscape

Posted February 7, 2012 By Mike Loughery and has no comments yet.

Mike Loughery

Mike Loughery is Director, Corporate Marketing Communications for CertainTeed Corporation

Here we are once again, heading to the International Builders’ Show in Orlando, Florida.  In the days of the housing boom, you could get a feel for the attendance and enthusiasm by how packed the plane was and the fact that it was filled with builders and contractors.

The past few years have been tough though.  Attendance, which once peaked in the low one-hundred thousands, was a mere shadow of itself a year ago with about 47,000 walking through the turnstiles. 

What will this year hold?  Well, I’m sitting on the plane.  It’s packed and a good number of the folks seem to be in the building trades (albeit for the few families headed you know where!).  Enthusiasm?  Well, not sure yet on that one.  But I know that tomorrow I will enter the hall, see all the displays, and hear the buzz of business taking place.  There is nothing as gratifying as spending four days talking with the trades about the latest products and innovations in the marketplace. 

The temptation for some might be to shrink away and not exhibit.  However, we all have businesses to run and CertainTeed representatives find talking to an engaged audience, whether it’s 50,000 or 100,000 an excellent opportunity to showcase some of the industry’s most innovative new products.  Products that improve indoor environmental quality, energy efficiency, comfort and aesthetics will be showcased as well as our team of building scientists will be available at booth W4051 to answer your most challenging questions.

Feel like swinging a hammer or learning from our experts?  We have product installation demos going on outside in P3, showcasing blowing and spray foam insulation, decking, siding and solar roofing. 

Can’t make it to the show this year?  Well, you can still be part of the action through a special webpage dedicated to the IBS show which will have a live Twitter feed that you can follow.  You may want to bookmark www.certainteed.com/ibs  so you can refer to it over the next few days.

If you’re in Orlando this week, stop by and say hi.  Let us know how things are going for you in your market.

About Mike Loughery

Mike Loughery is Director, Corporate Marketing Communications for CertainTeed Corporation

Solving an Acoustical Problem in a Retrofit Environment

Posted November 15, 2011 By Stan Gatland and has no comments yet.
 

Stan Gatland

Stan Gatland is Manager, Building Science Technology for CertainTeed Corporation

It can be a challenge to control the acoustics in older buildings when they are repurposed for multiple business uses.  One example is a call center situated in the middle of an office building, surrounded by cubicles of other workers and offices with many hard surfaces – glass, wallboard and wood doors. The perimeter of the call center has a low suspended ceiling with a decorative hard wood finish that amplifies and reflects the various sounds typical in an open plan office setting – loud telephone conversations and office equipment – carrying the disruptive noise throughout the floor.

The building owner had some ideas on how to improve the space but decided to work with an acoustical consultant to confirm the noisy conditions with measurements, as well as make recommendations on how to improve the space acoustically.

Acousticians commonly refer to highly sound reflective rooms as “live” or “reverberant.” Open plan office space should be designed for both good speech privacy and poor speech intelligibility.  Typically, you design for privacy at work stations and make speech unintelligible between adjacent areas by controlling background noise levels and reverberation time – the length of time it takes for a sound pressure level to decay or dissipate.

The results confirmed that background noise levels were high and intermittent and reverberation times exceeded the maximum recommendation of 0.60 seconds at most locations on the floor.

Another metric that was used to characterize the space was the speech transmission index (STI). STI is a measure of the ability to understand speech in a given space with the sound source coming from different directions or locations.

In open plan office settings, you want STI values to be low or poor meaning that people can’t understand each other from different locations.  Most locations had fair to excellent ratings creating a poor acoustical environment.

The recommendations provided by the consultant to solve the problem in this office space were:

  • Change the entire ceiling to high absorption suspended tile or use functional absorbers (hanging panels in the box like orientation)
  • Add some absorptive treatment to office doors or walls facing the open office
  • If not enough, use background masking noise.

It is expected that if the summary improvements were made it would improve comfort and maybe morale and productivity for the employees.

Time will tell. Do you have any examples of acoustical retrofit to share?

About Stan Gatland

Stan Gatland is Manager, Building Science Technology for CertainTeed Corporation

Categories:
 Building Science

A Fistful of Pencils – Measuring Solar Radiation on a Building

Posted September 16, 2011 By Lucas Hamilton and has no comments yet.

Lucas Hamilton

Earlier this week during a webinar I conducted on working with solar radiation, I gave an example to help people visual how the energy of solar radiation strikes a building or object. 

In physics and mathematics we would picture this energy as a vector component. I know that is not clear to a majority of non-science or non-mathematics practitioners so I often use an example with a fistful of pencils to help people visualize exactly what this means.  This is a fun little exercise but is not meant to be a scientific determination of the impact of solar radiation on a surface. This is simply a way to visualize the invisible.

Imagine the sunlight or energy coming across space and beating down on the surface of the roof at a normal angle which is a mathematical term for a 90-degree or right angle. To understand the impact of the solar radiation on that roof, take a piece of paper and draw a 1-inch square. Take a fistful of pencils (as many as will fit comfortably in your hand) making sure all the tips are even and bring your fist straight down on the paper striking it within the square.  Then count the number of strikes within that box and if you imagine each one of those strikes as being a unit of energy it gives you some idea of the impact of solar radiation on your roof.

If you want to imagine how that same sunlight is striking your wall, picture the angle that your wall is from that sun – usually about a 45-degree angle give or take.  Take the pencils in your hand and while sliding them to keep them flat to the paper turn your hand to a  45-degree angle and strike them into a 1-inch square box, you can see the number of strikes and what that impact would be significantly less. So if you again imagine that the pencil points are units of energy, you can see that only a fraction of the energy hits your wall compared to the roof.

This can be done with any angle and it gives you a very general idea of the solar energy impact on a surface.  While this does not give you scientific data to help you determine where your peak power would occur, it is one method that can be used to help visualize the best angle for solar panels on a roof. 

There are some online tools that can help calculate the intensity of the solar radiation based on geographic location. One example of such a tool can be found at: http://www.kahl.net/solarch/.

Lucas Hamilton is Manager, Building Science Applications for CertainTeed Corporation

About Lucas Hamilton

Lucas Hamilton is Manager, Building Science Applications for CertainTeed

Categories:
 Building Science, solar

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