IES Blog

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;

• The first is an “Energy Saving Clock” which allows you to choose the amount of time available and it throws up tasks that you could complete in that time.
• The other is the “Energy Saving House” that shows the savings that you can make in those all important pennies as well as CO₂ emissions.
• The third, which I think is the most valuable, is a new community site Britain Unplugged which allows people to discuss and share their ideas for energy savings, post videos and get hints and tips from their blog. Like an energy savers support group!

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!

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Tags:Britain Unplugged, Building Magazine, DECs, Display Energy Certificate, The Energy Savings Trust

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

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Tags:Architects, Engineers, Role of the Design Team, Sustainable Strategies, VE-Toolkits, VE-Ware

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

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Tags:Architecture 2030 Challenge, Early stage analysis, sketchup