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This year at our annual Christmas Conference, in amongst round-ups of the year, we crowned our very own “One Team” IES Apprentice. Each team had to come up against our very own Sir Alan, Nick and Margaret. They had 45 minutes to create ways that we could advertise for recruitment, there were a huge variety of presentations; we had songs, we had dancing, but our winners really encompassed what’s it like to work here.
A high proportion of the companies we do business with are in the sustainable design community, aiming to use computer simulation software to optimise the building design, reduce the energy consumption and minimise the impact on the environment.
So you work with the environment in mind, but do you take the same ethos home with you? There are so many questions that we all need to consider; what kind of car should you drive home? Do you even need to drive at all? Do you use energy saving bulbs? Do you recycle everything you could? What about at work? Do you try and reduce the resources consumed by the building you work in, not just the buildings you design? Is there a recycling policy? How much paper do you waste? Do you switch your computer or monitor off at night? How environmentally conscious are you and your company really?
So many questions, but if everybody does their own bit then it can make a real difference in attitudes and may even help people embrace green building even further.
At IES, we strive to make every aspect as environmentally friendly as possible, in the office, but also at home;
In the office
Company cars are either hybrid or highly fuel efficient
Employees are encouraged to cycle to work where possible, we have a cycle to work scheme
Recycle all paper, plastic and glass
Lights are on occupancy sensors
We are encouraged to switch off all IT and other equipment when not in use
We encourage web training and demos to reduce travel emissions.
We have drastically reduced the use of paper marketing materials by introducing USB’s
At home, we encourage everyone to
Use Energy Saving Light Bulbs
Recycle
Minimise water use
Minimise energy use
As the dust settles from the recent US presidential elections, the US emerges with Barack Obama as the President Elect. He will be officially taking office on January 20th, 2009 and will start to move ahead on some of his objectives that he supported during his campaign road. One objective in particular is to focus on how the US can work towards a more sustainable environment. The USGBC has taken this objective and started to structure and push forward an agenda for Washington.
The Business Week article, Obama’s Green Building Agenda, gives a brief overview of the plan which is based on four major targets and has an aggressive edge that I think will help push the US forward to the goal of a more sustainable environment and lifestyle.
Our friends at SketchUp have just launched SketchUp 7 – and the great news is our IES VE plug-in is compatible with this brand new version. Plus our latest version of the plug-in, which can now take SketchUp groups and components in account, is due out later this week.
SketchUp 7 is even more intuitive and includes tools for power users, plus it’s easier to find and share models with the world. Learn more and download at sketchup.google.com or view the great What’s New in SketchUp 7 video below:
Also this Thursday at 12.30 Chris Cronin of SketchUp fame will be presenting with us at GreenBuild at stand #1447.
Last time I wrote about 4 major initiatives that the entire building industry needs to come to grips with, and quickly. Al Gore has famously modified that African proverb:
“if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We have to go far quickly.”
I stated in my last blog that there are four different areas that our industry needs to focus on quickly and together – understanding passive design, bringing energy modelling into the earliest stages of design, understanding the world around us, and smart grid technology. Right now, most firms are still dealing with the first two issues…but the next two are around the corner for many engineers and architects.
People are moving quickly to tackle good sustainable design, but there is the “together” issue still looming large for many firms. What happens if you have designed a great passive building, then you go to submit it for building permit and it is denied? This is a big problem, and points more at the “together” issue that Al Gore mentions in the proverb. Many governments still have not caught up yet, and are giving inadequate guidance to help people get to big-time energy savings in buildings.
It turns out that permits get denied all of the time, primarily because of unfamiliarity with techniques and design principles for passive design. Even in California, arguably the most progressive government in the United States when it comes to energy efficiency, the California Energy Commission admits that it does not have standard processes in place to submit a permit for passive buildings designed with little or no cooling systems, or passively heated buildings. So even though you can analyze and predict passive design performance using our software, California may not accept it? Seems counterintuitive, given the urgent need right now for good buildings.
Currently California does have something that can help. California Title 24 (the name of the California building energy code) does allow architects and designers to receive permits for unique or novel buildings that are out of their normal field of vision…which includes naturally ventilated buildings, passive solar design, and mixed-mode hybrid designs.The design team simply needs to submit an Alternative Materials and Methods of Construction (AMMC) application, as outlined in section 10-104 of Part 1 of California Title 24. Our consulting arm has been involved with the successful submittal of an AMMC to the State of California and received permitting for non-standard designed. It can be a longer process, but you have to go down the path to receive the rewards of lower energy consumption.
Many local building code officials don’t see good passive design everyday. So what do you do when you want to build something unfamiliar? This is a big problem that our office has to address on a regular basis in San Francisco. If we are taking this whole green business seriously, and we believe the proverb, then both architects, engineers, and building officials all need to be a part of the solution. It doesn’t stop on the drafting table.
How are you addressing this issue in your hometown? What are the other avenues that local codes take to allow designs that don’t fit the mold, but in reality, are far more efficient? If your building officials don’t have a process, then how can you make sure they have one? (Kind of a grassroots question.) We are lucky here in California to have this process, and ASHRAE 90.1 also has a process in place. It would be really cool for other people to give responses sharing their stories about how they got around the building permitting issue for sustainable design. I think it goes to the heart of our problems and our quest for solutions. The development staff at IES feels that we’ve developed great tools to convince building officials of non-standard designs. It answers all of the thermodynamic questions that most good building officials would ask, and it helps to visualize the answers in more intuitive ways.
Let us know how we can help.
As an employee of IES who is looking at sustainability from the architecture and design point of view, I know how important it is to think of the energy consumption of a building before you finalize, or even start, a design. Thinking ahead to a green mechanical system is not something engineers are solely responsible for, nor is it something that can be achieved by adding a single solar panel. Green design is a holistic approach, viewing all aspects of the building as potential problems or solutions that could reduce the energy loads on the building. As a student as well as an employee, I am putting these ideas to use for a competition that my college will be involved in.
The 2009 Solar Decathlon takes place in Washington DC as a bi-annual event, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy. Twenty schools have been chosen to participate in this event. As a Masters of Architecture student of the Boston Architectural College, I am deeply involved with the project. Our architecture and interior design focused college partnered with engineering and policy students of Tufts University and entered the competition that will take place October 9-18, 2009. IES software is an invaluable tool for us to use throughout the design process.
IESVE has provided both time and resources for the Boston Architectural College/Tuft’s Team to analyze/gain real-time feedback on the design, and offers the team an advanced tool to tune their design to a point where it is ready to compete, and hopefully win this competition. This experience is teaching architects to work closely with the engineers throughout the design process by showing how important this is, instilling skills for the future. The team also has to work together to construct the design on the National Mall in Washington DC.
Please look for us in the future on our team website: http://www.teambostond.com/index.shtml
Keep up with the entire USDE 2009 Solar Decathlon at: http://www.solardecathlon.org
Hope to see you in 2009,
Michelle
What I’d like to do in my blog is provide some basic guidance with some simple hints and tips for taking your sexy SketchUp model one step further and running the likes of detailed energy consumption, Architecture 2030 Challenge benckmarking and LEED daylighting compliance analysis. Now, I’ve had a bit of experience using SketchUp over the last couple of months but not even close to some of you “super users” so please forgive me if some of this is old hat to you. However, and this is the point, there is a difference between the conventional way of drawing a SketchUp model, purely concerning the shell of the building and its aesthetics, and having individual rooms acknowledged for analysis eligibility.
Now, I am going to assume that you already know about the SketchUp plug-in and the room finding icons and so on and so forth (if not, please go to the SketchUp link on this website or go to www.youtube.com/IESVE). All I’d like to do is help you to get your model ready quickly and efficiently to streamline the process of analysing your building design.
Right, let’s cover the basics first, and then we can apply it to something relevant. You may have seen some of this in the literature, but I’ll assume you haven’t.
The first movie clip shows the basics of room creation and how the room finding algorithm finds spaces based on surfaces.
Once the 2nd room is extruded, you will see there is no floor. The fundamental rule for “rooms” to be acknowledged is they must be enclosed volumes. These have no floor, hence no rooms are found.
Drawing a line across the floor will then bound these spaces with the floor and also a partition wall. 2 rooms are found.
I don’t want a partition wall, so I’ll delete the surface. Woops! Only 1 room is found now.
I’ll draw the surface back in by adding a diagonal line to bound it, then delete the diagonal line.
This time, instead of deleting the surface, I’ll make the surface 0% opacity and it will be picked up as a partition, albeit an invisible one, but at least light, heat and air can pass through it. Ah ha! Now I have 2 rooms again.
Ok, so that fundamental rule is that to divide spaces into separate rooms, there must be a surface connecting them, then the levels of opacity will determine whether they are walls, windows, or holes.
0% hole
1-99% window
100% wall
Ok, let’s take that rule and apply it to my design.
1. We shall assume we have the floor plate but no individual spaces. If you want to know what the heating and cooling loads are for each of the rooms, not the whole floor because they have 1. Varying space usage and 2. Different orientations and hence varying solar penetration.
2. One of the spaces is in an open plan office but it’s very large so we want to split the space into perimeter and core, but maintain the space as open plan for solar tracking and heat/air transfer purposes.
3. So the steps shown in the 2nd movie are as follows.
a. Floorplate with no floor, no room found
b. Floor drawn, room found
c. Partition walls drawn to define enclosed office spaces.
d. Core and perimeter spaces drawn
e. Partition walls modified to have 0% opacity therefore in any subsequent analysis, light, heat and air can pass through into the adjacent space, but each room is considered its own entity from a load perspective.
The next step will be to run this model through the likes of VE-Ware (our free tool), the VE-Toolkits and modules within the full Virtual Environment. This will allow you to gauge its performance in terms of daylighting, airflow, energy and thermal comfort. And you thought your sexy SketchUp model was just for show eh. Wait ‘till my next blog.
Pete M
In the UK this week The Energy Savings Trust announced that half of us would be greener if we had a bit more time in our day! To help us with this they have provided us with three useful tools to help us manage our time;
Also this week a bit of Display Energy Certificate spotting is taking place over at Building Magazine, after a disappointing start they have decided to encourage people to do their own spotting. A £20 Amazon Gift Voucher to the person who visit the most public buildings seeking DECs by Wednesday the 5th of November. Why not email sustainability@cmpi.biz to enter!
An integrated design process is proving to be the key to achieving high-performance, sustainable buildings. By bringing all of the project stakeholders to the table at the early conceptual stage of the process, the team can set forth with a common set of goals. The result is that sustainable strategies are better coordinated during design and construction, and projects are more likely to be completed on time and on budget. Once the project is complete and the building is operational, the owner and building operators are familiar with the efficiency measures that were implemented and know how to keep them running properly.
Let’s focus on the role of the design team – architects and engineers. As a mechanical engineer, I have always enjoyed collaborating with architects to begin the analysis as early as possible. The decisions we make during conceptual design will impact a building’s performance for its entire life, so it is important that we begin to quantify the impact of these decisions. The building’s site orientation, its geometry, its envelope design, and the arrangement of spaces within the building (planning), will have dramatic effects on its energy consumption, the availability of daylighting, thermal comfort, and the effectiveness of passive strategies. This is also the stage where we must develop an understanding of the climate to determine which sustainable strategies are most appropriate.
VE-Ware and the VE-Toolkits have been designed with these issues in mind, but also as a means to improve collaboration between architects and engineers. As the architects devise various conceptual options in SketchUp or Revit, they can assess performance metrics along the way and share this information with the engineers for their input. The engineers can then use the same analysis model to help refine and optimize strategies that have been found to be beneficial to the building’s performance, or make recommendations where aspects of the design are found to be detrimental.
So, you can see that this approach starts to blur the line between the traditional roles of the architect and engineer. Architects performing analysis…Engineers helping the designers with the building form…What’s next? Cats and dogs living together in harmony? Only time will tell…
Dimitri Contoyannis, PE
I had the great pleasure of launching what might be best termed a “Green Blitzkrieg” last month as we landed in 9 US and Canadian cities and over 70 design firms from coast to coast. Many thanks to all those who hosted us – we hope you stay tuned via this blog and through our support lines. A big shout-out also goes to the 5 members of the Google SketchUp team who allied with our troops on numerous stops along the tour de force to engage and support our mutual mission to bring sustainable design mainstream.
The objective was to demonstrate the powerful, early-stage simulations now available with the push of a few buttons, quite literally, to inform designers on building performance with respect to the Architecture 2030 challenge, energy, carbon, solar shading, daylighting, even the potential for natural ventilation – all from one model created in either SketchUp or Revit (or indeed anything that exports gbXML). What we observed was extremely positive on several fronts.
So what did we learn?
1) The word is out. Building Performance Analysis (BPA) is in. This is no longer exclusively an engineering function and many in the architectural community are ready to don the hat of early-stage energy analyst. This trend is yet fledgling but absolutely essential (see last week’s entry by Chien Si- “An International Challenge”)! Awareness of the 2030 Challenge is now pervading the community and architects are past the “what” and onto the “how”. We delight in having a great answer for that in VE-Ware (freeware)! I encourage you all to stay tuned to the news section of the Architecture 2030 site for very interesting developments in key areas of the country. “Initiative” is becoming legislation…
2) While many architectural firms have “sustainability experts” on their teams, the majority of them lack access to a comprehensive toolset to effectively quantify the complex trade-offs between passive solar design or “lean design” strategies commonly employed by experienced designers. Early-stage, integrated analysis to assess the net effects of these strategies is the gateway to reducing energy costs and achieving carbon neutrality. Though this seems to be well understood, the need has not yet been met, until now.
3) We at IES have now turned a hard corner toward our goal to make analysis tools for lean environmental design accessible to the masses. Whereas IES tools may have previously been characterized as “robust, but complicated and expensive” for early stage design, we are now building up a reputation of “powerful and accessible” in terms of cost and complexity. Rest assured, we have just begun down this new road we call “from analysis to understanding”. Stay tuned for much more to come in the remainder of this year and next
Can’t sit still too long so we will be hitting the road again soon and visiting many more cities in the coming months. See you around!
Nicole
