Buildings + Beyond Podcast

Kelly Westby, Commissioning Director, Steven Winter Associates, Inc. 

Kelly Westby is the Commissioning Director at SWA.  She works with developers, owners, contractors, and design teams to improve building performance in the New York City area and throughout the Northeast, and has completed energy audits on millions of square feet of existing buildings.

Kelly’s work also includes other aspects of new construction and existing buildings such as site inspections and energy modeling. She specializes in identifying and implementing practices to lower building life cycle energy costs, optimize capture of incentives, and improve operations and maintenance. She conducts on-site testing and verification of the effectiveness of green design and building methods. She also documents and communicates results, including specific recommendations for corrective actions. Kelly’s commissioning, energy code, and energy efficiency projects cover millions of square feet of commercial buildings across the five boroughs. Read more

As code requirements become more stringent around the country, the process of commissioning is more valuable now than ever before. Acting as third-party quality assurance providers, commissioning agents help building owners by improving the quality of construction and reducing maintenance and energy costs in the long run.

On this episode, Robb interviews podcast co-host, Kelly Westby, who is also SWA’s Commissioning Director. Kelly explains the importance of quality control on any project and describes how commissioning has evolved into a process, rather than a one-off measure.

Send your feedback and questions to [email protected]

Buildings and Beyond is the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Buildings and Beyond is a production of Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building, and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. For more information, visit swinter.com.

Hosts: Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby

Production Team: Heather Breslin | Alex Mirabile | Dylan Martello | Jayd Alvarez

Kelly: 00:01
Welcome to buildings and beyond

Robb: 00:09
The podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment

Kelly: 00:13
By focusing on efficiency, accessibility and health.

Robb: 00:18
I’m Rob Aldrich.

Kelly: 00:19
And I’m Kelly Westby.

Robb: 00:22
In this episode I’m talking with Kelly about commissioning. Kelly Westby heads up our commissioning group here at Steven Winter Associates. And I’ve wanted to talk about commissioning for a while on the podcast, but it’s taken us a while to get to it. Kelly and I talked for quite a long time, which should surprise nobody who knows us, but we condense things a bit, so it’s a more concise discussion where we hopefully hit the high points. Kelly wanted to start with a good definition of commissioning.

Kelly: 00:54
So the ASHRAE guideline 0, the good old backbone of commissioning talks about commissioning as a process of ensuring that the building is designed, constructed, operated, and maintained in accordance with the design intent. And I like the definition, even though it’s a little bit wordy and a mouthful, and I can never remember the exact words, because it gets out a couple of different things that I think people miss when they’re thinking about commissioning. So the first thing is a process. So I think a lot of people think about maybe manufacturer start up as commissioning or you know, just a static or a one point in time test of a system as commissioning. But commissioning is really a process that’s applied to making sure that buildings are working properly. And that process, the timeline is, is part of that definition too. It’s from early kind of schematic design- predesign, through turnover, through into operation and can kind of move into continuous commissioning, which we can talk a little bit about. And then I like the ensurance part, it’s a quality assurance process, I say. And it doesn’t replace the quality control process that the general contractors need to be implementing throughout the project to make sure that things are being installed properly. It doesn’t replace that. It adds a layer of third party review kind of on top of that to make sure that the right quality control processes from the general contractor are kind of set up and being implemented properly. But we can offer a perspective of making sure that building systems holistically are operating properly. And I would say from an efficiency perspective for sure. But we’ve gotten a little bit in the industry. I think commissioning has gotten pigeonholed into the efficiency world alone because it falls in the efficiency category, the energy efficiency category and lead and because it’s required by energy code. But I think commissioning is so much more than that that it really has to do with like the guest experience, like thermal comfort acoustical performance. If equipment isn’t installed properly, it’s going to be very noisy and that’s going to impact the health and wellbeing of the people in the space.

Robb: 04:03
I probably would have said comfort and reliability. What are the biggest advantages, I guess, to an owner, and energy efficiency, certainly. But, you know, I think a lot of our clients that is secondary, you know, it has to be comfortable, it has to work, has to be reliable, and then we don’t want to, you know, use tons of energy. Would it make sense to talk about a somewhat specific example, like say an outdoor air system for common spaces in a multifamily building. Can you kind of give us a brief outline of what’s involved in commissioning something like that or a different piece of equipment? Or a different system I guess?

Kelly: 04:58
Yeah, I hadn’t thought about it that way. I like that being on this side of the microphone because I can just ramble and you have to make sure that I stay on track. So this is fun. So if we get brought in in the beginning, the question is, what’s the intent of the space? What requirements do we need to pay attention to for outdoor air? Are you going for LEED? Are you going for passive house? What does the system need to be providing? So we need to set the guidelines for what we need from that system, including reliability, like you said. Comfort. Is humidity Okay in this space, can it go as high as 85% or as low as 10%? Or do we need to keep the humidity in a certain range for comfort? Do we want the temperature to be in a certain range for comfort? Are we a typical New York where we’re not going to supply cooling to the corridors in maybe a smaller multifamily project or is it a luxury condominium and we absolutely are going to provide cooling to the corridors. And so we have to have those discussions up front of what’s most important to the owner. And so that’s what we call the owner’s project requirements. So that’s kind of step one. And then we look at the design and make sure that all the things that we outlined, whether it’s, you know, passive house and you need to have energy recovery, making sure that that energy recovery system is shown there on the drawings and is set up in a way that it can work properly, that the equipment is located in a way that one day the maintenance staff can actually access the filters and change belts and be able to maintain the equipment and to also make recommendations about is there a more efficient way to do this? Is there a better way to lay out the duct work so that you can reduce noise or you can increase efficiency of the equipment? And then moving on into submittals, making sure that the submittals are appropriate and match with the design intent and the owner’s project requirements are, and watching through construction to make sure that during the course of construction, the entire system, so the duct work and the components, are being installed properly, that the outdoor air unit on the roof is being mounted properly, that the clearance is actually provided there and the field, that things have been coordinated. So you don’t have, for example, a pipe hanger running through your duct work. Not that I’ve seen that specifically or anything. And then we, we look at trying to set guidelines for how that equipment then gets started up and we’ll review kind of the startup reports from the manufacturers representatives and that some people call commissioning. And so that can be a little bit confusing so that the manufacturer will come up, come out to the site and start up the equipment, which basically means kind of turning it on and checking some of the boxes. And they might go through a pretty thorough and rigorous review of what’s going on. Or a pretty simple review, then we’ll come out and make sure, run through all the tests, make sure the equipment will go into heating mode or cooling mode, dehumidification mode if that’s required. And make sure that it kind performs the way that it was intended to perform. The system then gets turned over to the operation staff. And so we need to make sure that the operators know what the equipment is supposed to do, first of all, what the design intent was. How to maintain the equipment, when to change the filters, when to change the belts, what other kinds of things they need to double check, how to do regular commissioning, which we talked about the different kinds of commissioning. Since I commissioned the building to begin with, then if the operator goes through and runs tests every six months or a year, that’s called recommissioning to add another word in there. And then the we can get into monitoring base commissioning. So if we set the system up to be what people like to call smart these days with a couple of sensors, maybe ]checking the power consumption on the fan in the outdoor unit, maybe checking the temperature out of the unit and we can monitor that over time and make sure that it doesn’t deviate from where it’s supposed to be.

Robb: 10:06
And I think that that one piece where you turn on the equipment, measure some power, measure pressures, measure flow, you know, that that kind of one time check when it’s just turned on. I think in a lot of people’s minds that is commissioning. But I appreciate you laying out, you know, there’s a lot that goes before and after that.

Kelly: 10:25
Yeah. And I recognize that it’s, it’s quite a process. There is quite a long process. So it can be, it can be difficult to describe, to take the time to go through that whole process. And I do think because we as an industry have thought about commissioning as kind of that manufacturer’s startup, that checking of those boxes. I think it is looked at as a slice in time, but I do think that’s changing. And actually there is a a study that, I’m going to blank on who put it together, but that looks at how many commissioning agents that are part of the building commissioning association now do continuous commissioning type work. And I think it was something like 60% versus a couple of years ago, maybe several years ago. You know, that number was much lower. And so I think a lot more people are thinking about how our buildings really operating after the normal routine of kind of, you know, okay. It’s not like all the construction people are gone now.

Robb: 11:41
Yeah. And I think there’s been a shift in commissioning, cause my impression, and correct me if I’m wrong, you know, it kinda was a necessary evil for LEED. It’s like, all right, you have to have somebody come in and do commissioning and you have to pay him, but we just need the commissioning box checked so he can get our certification. Like 10 years ago that was kind of the feeling I used to get about commissioning. Do you run into that? Have you run into that?

Kelly: 12:12
Yes. And I think it depends on who you talk to and I would say it also, it really does depend on the type of building in the industry. The other thing is now it’s not just LEED that’s requiring commissioning, but the energy codes are requiring commissioning now. So that’s a whole different level of checking the box that now gets, you know, the local government involved. And these requirements are all over New York City for example, is eforcing it versus other places in New York state where it might be required, but it’s not enforced. So then what does that even mean when it’s enforced? What exactly is enforced? You just need the little report or a little a one pager that says we received the commissioning report. And so I do think that there’s this opportunity for the market to respond by providing a very low quality service. Just like anything else, like local law 87 in New York City where it was required to do retro commissioning and energy auditing every 10 years. And we had an episode with Lori Kerr and she was kind of expressing some disappointment in the impact that that had made on, on the industry in terms of energy. And I think that a lot of building owners took that as, you know, another one of those New York city regulatory boxes that they needed to check. And I think that some similar things are happening in mid Atlantic region right now with the green code requirements and commissioning being required as part of that. Well, okay, I got to the permitting phase, the design is complete. I got to the permitting phase and they won’t let me get a permit unless you give me a preliminary commissioning plan. And you have to explain, well, you know, I’m not just gonna give you a plan, like we have to actually do commissioning if we create this plan. And luckily in those places they require it at the, the permit stage. In New York I’ve had folks call me and say, Oh, we need a commissioning report to get TCO. Can you give us a commissioning report this week? No, I can’t. There’s probably somebody out there who will, but then there are other owners that call us and they say, you know, I really think that I need another set of eyes on this building and you know, we need someone to do this commissioning thing.

Robb: 15:22
So for most of your work, are there code or program requirements? I mean, there’s growing code requirements, so

Kelly: 15:32
Yeah. There are growing code requirements and frankly LEED is required by code in a lot of places. So even some LEED projects are actually technically code projects. But it’s certainly a mix. A mix of different types of projects, different types of clients, different goals, and I do think commissioning, even ASHRAE says that, you know, commissioning is based on the owner’s project requirements. There’s always going to be differences in your process because of that, because it’s based on the owner. It’s not based on Kelly’s project requirements and I’m going to do commissioning my way on every project and if you don’t like commissioning my way, then go somewhere else. Potentially that is a method of commissioning. But I think that it is important to think about commissioning as finding the gaps in that particular project and figuring out how to fill those gaps. So for example, in some projects, everything runs through the general contractor and they are good about getting their subcontractors to respond to issues in the field and getting them to be on site at the right times. And other times we speak directly with the subcontractors, because that’s what’s appropriate on that job. And if I said I would never reach out to a subcontractor directly, I think that there would be some projects where I wouldn’t get traction. Now it’s, it’s a dicey relationship. We commissioning providers have literally no authority whatsoever. We don’t hold any of the contracts. Nobody gets paid by us. So we can get language if we’re brought on early enough, we can get language into the specifications that require subcontractors do certain things, but ultimately we’re not paying them. So there’s 1,000,001 things in the specifications and the con, you know there are some projects where not all million and one things get implemented on the job. So it can, it, this kind of trying to influence the project without having any authority is much more of a human behavior question than a technical question.

Robb: 18:20
Yeah. But that’s, I mean, I think that’s similar to all kinds of certifications. You know, I’ve, I’ve seen that I’ve been more involved in residential certifications, energy star, HERS ratings, but also leed, and you know, you’re not paying anybody, you’re a contractor to the owner or the architect or whoever it may be. And this is it. You report to the owner and you say, all right, check, check, check. We got something missing here that needs to be corrected. And then, you know, what the owner does with that or your client does with that will vary like crazy. But I think the best clients, you know, are organized enough, have their ducks in a row that there’s a method to, you know, get it done. You know, figure out who’s responsible and make sure that they address, address the gaps.

Kelly: 19:19
Yes, I do agree with you in some ways, but I would say that with a program, you’re either in or you’re out, right. And there’s a list of requirements and if you’re in, then you have to do those requirements. And that’s, that’s that. With commissioning, the owner gets to decide that ultimately. So it’s up to us. It’s more of recommendations along the way. The commissioning process is required by code and by LEED, but every little thing that we recommend is not necessarily.

Robb: 20:06
Gotcha. Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. That totally makes sense. I mean, even if you find some big gaps, you still have done the commissioning and then, and then the ball’s in the owner’s court as to how they want to use that information.

Kelly: 20:23
Yeah. And that question is super valid. I mean, do you ever end a commissioning project with zero open issues?

Robb: 20:32
Do you ever end a commission project with zero open issues?

Kelly: 20:37
Only if the owner accepts as is all the open issues and then they get converted to accept it as is. But yeah, I mean there’s like some things can’t be closed because, or I guess can’t be resolved because they got caught a little too late or it’s too expensive at this point to go back or there’s a lot of finger pointing along the way or they fired the mechanical contractor halfway through the job, you know, lots of things happen. So it’s not a perfect buttoned up process at the end unfortunately.

Robb: 21:14
So my first experience with commissioning, which I now know is should have been called retro commissioning. I was in grad school in the 90s and there was a new, very fancy new engineering building at the university of Colorado. And one of my professors got some funding to hire a grad student. I think it was first summer, it might’ve been first semester, to commission all the systems and there was a very fancy, advanced BMS with logging all kinds of variables everywhere. So I had the list of hundreds of points and my job was to go around the building and all the systems and measure with the second instrument, all of these points. So I was going through the air handlers measuring pressures and temperatures and humidities and doing Peto traverses and there was a structural stuff. I needed the money. It was a job. It was kind of boring. I’m just walking through what you know, is this really worthwhile? I’m just going through hundreds of points, hundreds of points, hundreds of points, very tedious. And I came to one of the air handler fans, like the main air handler fan and I was looking at it, it’s like, man, these pressures are high. And I had access to see what the control parameters were and the static was supposed to be set at one of the air handlers at 1.5 inches, it was instead set to 15 inches, which of course the fans couldn’t do. So the fans are screaming, the VFDs were pegged. And you know, I talked to the facilities guys and it was no big deal. It’s just a decimal point. And he just changed it. And then everything was right. But that was like right there. That paid for my time during this summer job, fivefold I did the math. And it was like, man, you really gotta you really gotta check. Somebody gotta check all this stuff. So it was pretty interesting, but, but that you would call that retrocommissioning right. The systems are in the buildings occupied. All right. Go in and see how things are working.

Kelly: 23:45
Yeah, yeah. And sometimes the line is blurry if the building just opened and then you realized that you should have commissioned it in the first place. And I wouldn’t stick to strictly to it if you’re, you know, going through and testing making a plan and testing systems and making it work properly. I think that sounds pretty good. But yeah, I think that that’d be more retrocommissioning. But it’s interesting that you said you know, you got excited when you found something. I thought about this a little bit before we started talking and people just love calling out other people’s stuff that they did wrong. Like it’s like human nature to just want to talk about what other people do wrong. I think it’s funny because we have the presentation that we, that we made into a podcast that you did with Steve, the top 10 design mistakes, right? If it was the top 10 things you should do in design, I don’t think as many people would be as excited about it. Right? So, yeah, so we do at commissioning conferences sometimes people do presentations on like trying to one up each other on weird stuff they found in the field and it can be hard to do over audio. Some of the weird stuff we find. But yeah, absolutely. 1.5 versus 15 it’s a small mistake because it’s one little period, but it’s a big mistake in terms of energy consumption.

Kelly: 25:48
We’ve seen toilet exhaust ducted to the wrong side of the ERB and supplying into the space. So you know, things happen.

Robb: 26:01
And nobody would discover that?

Kelly: 26:03                   Yeah, until it started smelling weird. I’m not sure. I hope that they would, I’m not sure. And some of the energy stuff you really wouldn’t discover. So many, a lot of spaces have a heating system and a cooling system and those systems are separate but serving the same space and there’ll be operating at the same time. So you feel okay in the space because you’re being provided hot air to heat you up and then cold air to cool you down. So you’re on average, you’re okay. But you’re just running out those systems forever and spending rons on your, on your energy bills for no reason or your equipment is banging on and banging off all the time. So some things like that, some things you might notice, you might hear something when it’s operating improperly or you might feel uncomfortable, but you really have to go through the systems one by one step-by-step to make sure that everything’s working properly.

Robb: 27:04
Is any of that made easier or less time consuming or streamlined or whatever by newer technology, by smart systems, by IOT, I mean if you and the one of the HVAC contractors don’t go through the system step-by-step measuring pressures, measuring powers, measuring flow rates and instead all of this equipment gets installed. Can that lower the labor, lower the upfront time and as well as provide some down the road evaluation?

Kelly: 27:45
There’s potentially a bunch of software companies that disagree with what I’m about to say, but I think that maybe in the future, but I’m not sure that we’re there yet, Number one. Number two, I think that who commissioned then all of their sensors, I actually think you just added to the amount of time you have to be double-checking sensors in the field. The simplest system to check is like a one to one heat pump or you know, a packaged terminal key pump,

Robb: 28:17
Single speed on off. Yeah.

Kelly: 28:19
Yeah. The system’s right there. It’s not doing anything crazy. Oh, and by the way, it turns out packaged systems are actually more efficient than giant central systems, but we can save that for another podcast. I think we have this idea that if we say IOT and machine learning, then we can take humans out of the equation. And I just, I don’t think, I don’t believe in that philosophy. And I think that we are adding more and more sensors, more and more control points and that just makes the importance of commissioning even more because it’s not always going to be obvious what’s messed up.

Robb: 29:07
Do you have experience working with different engineers or different contractors repeatedly? Where it gets easier? I mean, did they come to appreciate you being there or, or other commissioning agents being there? Do you get, you know, a more streamlined working relationship or is it that the first time Every time?

Kelly: 29:33
That’s a good question. I think you should probably ask them, but I think, yes, I think the process does get easier. Oftentimes. The thing is, even if it’s the same engineer, it’s a different actual person, human being. So it might be the same engineering firm, but might be a different human being. Maybe it’s the same person, but it’s the combination of people are different or it’s a different system. so there are so many things that can change. And what I’ve really, truly been amazed by in my career and it, I call it job security, there is so many different ways that something can be messed up. So every time I think, you know, this isn’t something we need to pay as much attention to. Just like you said, you know, like, do I have to test every single sensor? Like, okay, packaged the packaged coil, like we talked about this a little bit packaged refrigerant oil, like the packaged unit. I’m not going to test the refrigerant charge in the field. It’s a package unit comes and you know, you install it and it’s fine, it turns out not always. So we, there was a catastrophic failure at a project that they kind of found later on that there was pinhole leaks and all of the packaged heat pump systems. Oh man. And they traced it back to a factory in Mexico that had just opened up and this was their first batch and they forgot about quality control or or whatever. But things like that can happen. Mistakes get made everywhere along the line and so it’s really important for, it’s important. I think for us as an industry now, I’m obviously biased, but to allocate capital resources to making sure those things are set up properly because like we were talking about hotels, if you put a guest in that space and it’s not working properly, you have to pay them back for that room probably under certain brands. Right.

Robb: 31:54
I sort of asked you this before. I mean with code requiring commissioning more and more, Are you seeing more buy in to the value of the process?

Kelly: 32:16
That’s a good question and I think that I might give you a little bit of a non-answer. The thing is I have been trying to make sure that we are having as big of an impact as we can have with the time that we have. And so we trying to move to really working with clients that, that are understanding the impact of commissioning and rather than rushing to open the building, which is reasonable, there is a large amount of money at stake if buildings don’t open it on time. But if we don’t set ourselves up with a proper plan from the beginning, then things can get behind and commissioning can look like it’s slowing down the process because it happens at the end. And with the code you need the sign off for your temporary certificate of occupancy. So it can be a very sensitive time for everyone. So I think that in some ways it makes the commissioning provider even more of the bad guy because you’re the one person holding up a C of O potentially. If you want to require something like for example, a bare minimum that they’ve at least started up their boilers. I would say there are some clients that haven’t, hadn’t necessarily done a lot of commissioning before and because it’s required, they’ve started to do it and they be grudgingly tell me that they are happy.

Robb: 34:13
So, so why do you like commissioning?

Kelly: 34:24
I like commissioning because you can look at a project early on and get an idea of what needs to be done and then follow that through to the very end of the project and see all the details then getting built around you and make sure that those things really work well really happen. I had worked in doing some energy auditing and you make a lot of recommendations and things may or may not go through depending on funding or other things. But 90% of the time that you work on a, on a commissioning project, the building will get built either way. And without you, it will get built in a crappier way, so you can definitely your energy is spent improving the built environment.

Speaker 6: 35:21
Thank you for listening to buildings and beyond. For more information about the topics discussed today, visit www.swinter.com/podcast and check out the episode show notes. Buildings and beyond is brought to you by Steven winter associates. We provide energy, green building and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment our professionals have led the way since 1972 and the development of best practices to achieve high performance buildings. Our production team for today’s episode includes Dylan Martello, Alex Mirabile, and myself. Heather Breslin, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Victor Calise, Commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities

As Commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, Victor Calise has been an advocate for people with disabilities in both the Bloomberg and de Blasio Administrations. Responsible for ensuring that New York City is the most accessible city in the world, Calise advises the Mayor and agency partners  on accessibility issues, spearheads public-private partnerships, and chairs the Accessibility Committee of the City’s Building Code.

Commissioner Calise began his City service working with the Capital Projects Division of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation where he led efforts to make one of the largest and most complex parks systems in the world accessible by ensuring compliance with the construction standards, managing facilities, and developing training materials. Prior to working in New York City government, he was a disability advocate in the non-profit sector. Read more

Did you know that New York City is home to approximately one million people with disabilities? As we often discuss strategies for improving the built environment, it is critical that accessibility remains at the forefront of the conversation. So, in a city as big and dynamic as New York, who is tasked with ensuring that the spaces in which we live, work and play are fair for all?

On this episode, the Buildings + Beyond team had the privilege of chatting with Victor Calise, Commissioner of the NYC Mayor’s Office of People with Disabilities (MOPD). Commissioner Calise describes the actions that he and his team have taken to help NYC become one of the most accessible big cities in the US. In addition, the Commissioner reminds us that we need to take a human-centered approach, not just to design, but to life.

Related Episodes

Send your feedback and questions to [email protected]

Buildings and Beyond is the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Buildings and Beyond is a production of Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building, and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. For more information, visit swinter.com.

Hosts: Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby

Production Team: Heather Breslin | Alex Mirabile | Dylan Martello

Kelly: 00:06
Welcome to buildings and beyond.

Robb: 00:09
The podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment

Kelly: 00:13
By focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Robb: 00:18
I’m Rob Aldrich.

Kelly: 00:19
and I’m Kelly Westby.

Kelly: 00:22
[Intro] Victor Calise is the commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities. He has the very modest job of making New York city the most accessible city in the world. So I was introduced to commissioner Calise when Harold Bravo from our accessibility team served on the code committee for the New York city building code chapter 11. But in this episode we talk about accessibility in a much broader sense than just the code. Access to the arts, ferries, playgrounds, as well as access to work opportunities for people with disabilities. Commissioner Calise catches me saying differently abled people, this may seem innocuous, but he reminds us all that language matters. The person comes before their disability and people-first language is critical in creating the mindset we need to provide access for everyone. Just like Kristoff in our episode on human psychology in the built environment, Commissioner Calise urges us to take a human centered approach, not just to design, but to life. So let’s get right to it.

Kelly: 01:22
Thank you so much and welcome to Buildings and Beyond, we wanted to set the scene by having you tell us a little bit about your professional journey and how you became the commissioner of the New York city mayor’s office for people with disabilities.

Victor: 01:37
Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It’s really nice to be on the podcast. So yeah, it’s certainly been a journey. It’s been a journey in my career from where I was 25 years ago as a blue collar worker working in the plumbing sector and then being injured, having a bicycle accident that left me paralyzed, and changing things up. I Had to go back to school, got involved in a lot of disabled sport. And in 1998, I was a Paralympic athlete in the sport of sled hockey in Nagano, Japan. So that was pretty cool. Yeah. And through that whole sports era, I realized that the department of parks and recreation in New York city just wasn’t doing enough for people with disabilities. So I got involved in a roundabout way and wanted to really push the agenda for accessibility in parks. And eventually I got recruited over to parks and I was in charge of providing programs and services and looking at design and construction for people with disabilities. And, and it was a great job. We developed a transition plan figuring out what barriers existed in New York city parks department and how we would fix the barriers. I would argue today that all the work that we’ve done in playground design, that we are one of the leaders, if not the leader in accessible playgrounds around the world. We’ve been adding lots of different features for people with disabilities, people with visual disabilities, people with hearing disabilities, people with physical disabilities, people who are aging, and really putting some design standards in place that exist today. And it’s great to see the work that they’re doing and seeing how important the Commissioner was and how it really was a top down approach really inspired me to, to look for a position like that. And fortunately for me at that time, this position for the mayor’s office with people with disabilities opened up and I’ve been here for seven years now and serving two administrations and it’s been, it’s been great being able to make effective change and changing the way people live their lives in New York city for accessibility.

Kelly: 03:59
Yeah, that’s great. Let’s dig in a little bit.You covered a wide range of initiatives there. So what’s one thing do you think that you’re involved in, in New York city today, that really has the biggest impact, or maybe top three impact?

Victor: 04:16
Wow. We’re involved in so much everything that touches New York City and every agency we’re involved in. If we’re talking about voting democracy NYC, we’re involved in voting. If we’re talking about the cultural plan were involved in the cultural plan, if we’re talking about vision zero, we’re involved in vision zero. So there’s nothing in the city that we don’t touch. So to say the top three, wow. So many different things. Well number one, I’ll start with transportation. We’ve added an accessible ferry system. That throughout New York city that’s been amazing. Fully accessible bathrooms on the same floor, kiosks that are accessible for people to purchase tickets. So we’re pretty excited about that. And along with that, we, the city of New York, are the only city in the world to put a cap on these ride sharing companies in the four high a vehicle sector. And when that happened, that cap was one thing, but it now allows, if they’re going to put any vehicles on the street there for wheelchair accessible vehicles. So we’re really excited to be able to drive that. And in the yellow sector we’ve been able to add accessibility in that sector as well. And the great part about that is we’re the only city in America to be able to have the number of accessible taxis and for hire vehicle fleet. So we’re pretty excited about that in transportation. Another great thing that we’ve done is we added disability service facilitators and agencies across the city. People that are people with disabilities or represented in the disabled community, and what they’re doing is they’re looking at the programs and services they deliver and looking at the design and construction that’s happening to ensure that accessibility not only meets the ADA codes and requirements, but goes above and beyond that.

Kelly: 06:11
Yeah, that’s great. We have the New York City landscape changing constantly and like you said, commuting by ferry, that wasn’t quite as big of a thing. Now we have New York city ferry. Do you think the changing landscape makes it more difficult? How do you keep up with all of the changes and construction that’s going on?

Victor: 06:42
Well, one thing is important to have those representatives that I mentioned earlier, those disability service facilitators in those agencies, because they’re really the pulse of what’s happening in that agency and being able to hear what’s going on, and getting briefings from those agencies is important.

Kelly: 06:59
And then you can have a coordinated effort.

Victor: 07:00
Yes. That’s it. What’s the coordination happening? And making sure that agencies have a pulse on what’s going on and making sure there’s representative there and that all complies. But New York city is an old city, right? And making it accessible can be a challenge sometimes, but everything was built before the ADA without people with disabilities in mind. So we have to be cognizant of what’s happening, considering the nature of the infrastructure and what’s difficult to access and what needs to be changed is what we are all about.

Kelly: 07:36
Right. And so how, how do you look back at buildings? You talked a little bit about this with the parks department having accessible playgrounds, which is actually something that I haven’t thought about as part of the built environment. That’s an important part of the built environment.

Victor: 07:50
Well, you think about it, we all learned on a playground, right? And kids with disabilities should have that same opportunity or parents with disabilities or people who are aging to be able to play with their grandchildren at that playground, it all makes sense.

Kelly: 08:04
That’s an excellent point. And that speaks a little bit to sort of universal design versus accessibility. So you could build maybe a space that is technically accessible by sort of ADA requirements, but it sounds like your initiatives are actually focusing on any kind of different abilities, not just strictly can a wheelchair get from point A to point B, but can people at with different abilities, maybe pregnant women, maybe elderly folks that are taking care of young kids, how can they access the space? Tell me a little bit more about the inter-play and how your agency sees kind of the interplay between setting the bare minimum standard and then really incorporating everybody.

Victor: 09:04
So if we look at the ADA, a great piece of legislation as a whole, and we look at the guidelines and the guidelines are really driven for physical disabilities, we really don’t think about other disabilities. We do, but they’re minor. So what we try to do is really bring that up to a higher level, right? When we’re thinking about people with disabilities, we really need to be cognizant of what that means, right? That’s people with hearing disabilities and it’s people who are deaf. People are hard of hearing, people that have lost their hearing, right? There’s so many different levels of hearing, but we have to be cognizant of that and make sure that’s included. When we’re talking about blindness, it’s not just people who are blind, it’s people with low vision and all different degrees of vision that people go through in their life. And we have to think about people with cognitive disabilities that’s important. People on the spectrum, people with mental health concerns, right? All of that needs to really be addressed. And of course people with physical disabilities. So that all interplays and when we’re talking about accessibility, it’s so broad in its scope and we have to really dial down on things and make sure that what we’re providing is accessible to all of those sectors. And it can be challenging at times, but there’s ways to do it. And that’s where we’re committed to do and the expertise that we have in our office, looking at lots of different technologies that are emerging, looking at infrastructure that’s being built and making sure that those big four, as we like to call it, the cognitive hearing, vision and physical disability are incorporated into everything the city does.

Kelly: 10:44
Okay, got it. Not all of our listeners have read through the entire ADA requirements for any of those. What disabilities do the older fair housing act, ADA mostly look at?

Victor: 10:59
They look at physical disabilities, wheelchair access and height ranges and turning radiuses and stuff like that, which are all important. Because I mean, you even mentioned it before, people who are aging, right? We acquire disabilities as we age. Right now you’re looking at me and a year ago I wasn’t wearing glasses and now I am. And that’s something that has happened, right? People don’t realize that they acquire disabilities and vision is certainly one of them. And you may not be wearing glasses one day, but for reading purposes another. So things change and we have to be prepared for that and build our environment for that. So as you age, you age in place.

Kelly: 11:41
Right. And that we had an episode focused on universal design, mostly in single family homes, small multifamily homes. But how can you make a space that you’re not constantly having to change with the way that your body will change? We know how our bodies will likely change. How can we incorporate that into the space? So it sounds like you guys maybe are looking at that from a public works perspective.

Victor: 12:09
Absolutely. From a public works perspective. And there’s so much construction that happens and frequently people come into our office from thinking about flood issues and how that affects people with disabilities, making sure that we have accessible options through that. It can be anything. It could be parks and playgrounds that we constantly see. And I’m trying to think as I’m talking about all the things that happen in the city and all the jobs that we look at from waterfront access, to beach access, to bathroom access, it just goes on and on.

Kelly: 12:46
Right. That’s an excellent point. And we talked a little bit about there’s a lot of existing landscape in the city. We didn’t necessarily have the same size walkways as we would want now. The same size hallways as we would want now. The codes cover new buildings and renovations. Is there anything that we can do with the existing building stock and what are you guys looking at with the existing building stock?

Victor: 13:16
Well I want to say this really loud and I can’t wait till we get to the existing building code and really be able to change that and say “Hey what do we do in these existing buildings? Cause people are having issues.” People are not sure what to do or how to do it. They apply the new code to existing buildings, which is great. And we’d like that. But there are also constraints with that and we have to be cognizant of it and a lot of people are getting sued under this, under the ADA. And we have to figure out a way to dive into that existing building code and let people know what that is. And people are just lazy on design and not really thinking, cause you have to think outside the box for some of these old older buildings. And what type of infrastructure can be put in place. Is it ramps? Is it a lift to get in there or do you have color contrast that that’s there and things at proper heights and do you have doorbells that allow people to see and so many different things. And you have to be creative in what’s happening in this existing spaces and apply everything that you can. People simply just want to come into our office and say, “we can’t do this, we’re grandfathered in.” Well A. grandfather doesn’t exist and B. you can do this. You just have to go back and think creatively.

Kelly: 14:49
Right. And that’s an excellent point. And I, I’ve talked probably on a couple of other episodes. There’s a lot of different things even that we cover within our office from sustainability, accessibility, universal design. And there might actually be conflicts between say one example that I’ve given is, the the door thresholds for accessibility. You want to be flat so you can get in easily, for passive house, you need a insulation around them. So how do you insulate it when it’s flat to the ground? So things like this, where we’re trying to balance different priorities. So it almost feels like, how the design world is trying to balance a bunch of different priorities and they’ve just said, you know what, we’re just not going to look at this universal design thing. It’s too overwhelming. It’s too scary. Accessibility.We’ll Try to check the box with as little as possible, but maybe they’re really not focusing in the right place.

Victor: 15:49
And no one really cares about disability until it happens to them. And it’s really important that people look at this, because we mentioned earlier people will acquire disabilities, could very well happen to you, right? It can. But think about this, how will it apply to you as you get older, or how it will apply to your grandmother or grandparents right?

Kelly: 16:13
Yeah. No, that’s an excellent point. We talked a little bit about human behavior too. There’s statistics out there, there’s plenty of information that says this is a better way to build a building. Universal design and thinking about people with disabilities, thinking about differently abled people.

Victor: 16:29
Oh no, no, differently abled is something we dont say! And language is important too and really thinking about how we drive, because what we try to do in our office is ensure that there’s equity across everything and language is really important. So, and I know we have to really think about language there and there’s a lot of different things that you don’t say in disability because what you want to do is really provide a space where people aren’t offended or people are accepted. So we really have to think about our language.

Kelly: 17:09
Yeah. And I thought about that a lot at first and messed it up there. But it’s one thing the framing is sort of the human centered focus, right? So it’s people, everybody is a person first and anything about them is secondary.

Victor: 17:25
Yeah. We like to use person first language a lot because you put the person before the disability instead of saying a wheelchair person, you’re saying a person in a wheelchair. So those are really the importance, or a blind person- It’s a person who is blind. And then those are some of the language that we like to put forward. And there’s also the H word.

Kelly: 17:52
Right? Yeah. Tell me more about the H word.

Victor: 17:54
Yeah, the H word is the word handicap and we don’t use that anymore. It’s just an archaic word. And people just like to be referred to people with disabilities. Plain and simple.

Kelly: 18:09
Yeah. And that’s an excellent point. And I think centering around humans, if we think about universal design with that lens, then I think we don’t get so tied up in this specific, “Oh can you make the turn in this room.” Well if we drop that lens, can we just think about all people? How can all people use this space in a more effective way? I think that’s excellent. Are there initiatives for people like me to increase sensitivity around around the language that we use to move the, the discussion forward in a healthy way?

Victor: 18:54
Yeah. And there’s a lot of different ways, right? One of the things that I didn’t mention earlier, but I’m going to mention now is a program that we have called NYC at work. It’s a public private partnership first ever in New York city, to employ people with disabilities. And we hear a lot about diversity and inclusion today, but if you hear about that diversity inclusion initiative, it doesn’t, it never includes people with disabilities. Never does. It never does. I want you to really dial in to the conversation next time you hear it and don’t say anything but just listen. You will not hear disability mentioned and if you do, let me know who they are because I want to be involved with them. So hiring people with disabilities, seeing people with disabilities in your office, understanding what that’s like and what their experiences are at work or how, how they can be such a collaborator with you and being able to bring new ideas, different approaches. We don’t see that in the workplace too much. So employing people with disabilities are certainly one of them. I’m also taking unconscious bias classes is another great thing. And more importantly, disability etiquette, reading up on disability etiquette and taking disability etiquette classes. I mean, one other thing, great things that our office does is that we go around and we give disability etiquette training to people that are involved with us. And it’s really something that’s eye opening. We are now developing a training module that will to train city employees that we’re developing right now on what disability etiquette is and how to work with people with disability, how to approach people with disabilities, what language is around. So it’s pretty in depth.

Kelly: 20:49
And that’s sort of like a fix ourselves first program? Or not fix, but work with people within the government agencies kind of as a first and make sure that those people have an understanding

Victor: 21:04
Well yeah, we do a lot of training within city government as well, but we also do with businesses that we partner with as part of our NYC at work initiative and where people have made complaints about businesses not doing things correctly. And then we’ll reach out to those businesses and work with them so they understand how to work and talk with people with disabilities. Really important. Really important to get it right. And it’s a process and we wish we could turn things around as quickly as possible, but people need to, to know and understand. But it’s not until you really have people with disabilities, the only people with disabilities in the workforce and fully inclusive education that we’re really going to move the needle for people with disabilities.

Kelly: 21:50
Right. That’s an excellent point. I’m gonna take a little bit of a turn. You mentioned technology and how technology is changing things. Do you have any specific examples of how technology is advancing the way that people with disabilities can interact with spaces or can interact with the built environment?

Victor: 22:22
Yeah, lots of different ways. We, we do a lot of work with museums around the city. And we use technology that drives people to exhibits and be able to if you think you go to an exhibit and you put on headphones and it talks to you about what that exhibit is, that’s one piece of technology. Another piece of technology that we’ve been working with is the Broadway theaters and something called Gallop Pro and the technology that’s there, it allows a person to get an app or a device at a theater and be able to get audio description and captioning on demand. In the past you’d have to wait for a specific show. Now you just go to a show that you want two weeks after it’s performance and it’s audio described. It’s captioned and people can get this technology. That’s great stuff that we’re driving. One other great thing that we’ve been, that we’ve done is work with link NYC. You know, those links you see on the street, the big kiosks. We reinvented the payphone and what that came the link NYC. And we’ve added a lot of accessible little features in there, height features, brail features, talkback features that are there and we’re always looking to add new technologies.

Kelly: 23:41
And what exactly does Link do for people that dont know?

Victor: 23:44
It’s a free phone on the street and free web service that’s on the street, free wifi hotspots that are on the street that people can get and they’re fully inclusive to people with disabilities.

Kelly: 23:55
Awesome. That’s great. And we’ve focused a lot on the New York city context. What do you think makes the biggest difference here versus maybe in other places around the world? I know you’ve done some traveling and speaking engagements in other places. What do you see as kind of our strengths and weaknesses? Is it dependent on the kind of buildings that we have?

Victor: 24:20
Sure. Well the great thing about New York city, is it really is the greatest city in the world. I’m a pompous new Yorker and I’m not going to hold back. And there’s a lot to do and there’s a lot to see and there’s a lot to make accessible and people are really interested about what happens in New York City. I’ve been around other parts of the world and I see other great things that are happening. And when I see those things happening, I’m just like, well, how do we get involved with that? How do I steal that?

Kelly: 24:53
What was one idea you found from somewhere else?

Victor: 24:55
Well, it’s a lot of technology. Stuff like the Gallup pro that we’ve been using in theaters is something that I’ve seen there. Different crossings ways that other people are looking at crossings for people with disabilities. Accessible pedestrian signals. I’ve seen something when I was in Wellington, New Zealand, I saw some great accessibility. Every singlized crossing had accessible pedestrian signals that are there. And I thought that was great. So it allows a person with a visual disability to cross the street in a safe manner. But just like every single signalized crossing was there and I was like, wow, this is pretty cool. They really got it right. And seeing things like that, it’s like, all right, we can do that. We will figure out how we can do that and we’re adding more and more on our street and continue to do so.

Kelly: 25:49
Yeah, that’s great. We talked a little bit before we started recording about 1% better, so if we can get a couple of 1% better every day. Any of the programs that we have, do you see any opportunity to replicate them at the national level?

Victor: 26:07
We are working a lot with other mayor’s office, with people with disabilities across the country and we just held the first convening in may of all those offices, about 13 offices everywhere from Chicago to Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, st Louis, Chicago. So yeah, usual suspects and we’re working together for different initiatives and where we were looking to start an empowered cities initiative where we work on financial empowerment, housing and employment for people with disabilities. So there are certainly some national efforts that are happening and and we convene every other month via phone to talk about the issues that we’re having and see which, who’s tackling what and what best practices are happening in and how we can all make it better.

Kelly: 27:04
Great. And thinking about something that’s gone the other way. We had the national ADA requirements and then we have kind of the local code requirements. You were on the code committee with one of our accessibility consulting directors. Sorry, I’m jumping around a little. To develop chapter 11, the accessibility chapter. How is this code language moving us forward in New York? We spoke a little bit about kind of the host of existing buildings, but what are some of the things that you guys were focused on getting in this round into the accessibility code?

Victor: 27:46
So the great thing about the code is you really need to come to consensus, right? And thinking about when we go through that, we had a lot of different people in the room, right? We had architects and designers and building people and city people. And the list goes on and on and on. And in a room like that, it can be tough. But the idea with the, with the chapter 11 was, and I set the tone at the beginning, I want to figure out ways that we can go above and beyond accessibility. And we found ways to do that and we build consensus around it. We’ve increased the number of accessible tables that are, that are in restaurants. We put in new parking spots, bicycle parking spots for people with disabilities because people with disabilities like to ride bikes. Either it’s a hand cycle, a tricycle or a tandem bike, and that requires a little bit more space. So we’ve added more space for that. We’ve looked at different ways to look at elevator access because what we’re doing right now is we have these destination elevators and you ever go to see one of those destination elevators. You go in, you press a floor and then one comes, it brings you right to that floor. And they’re really confusing because they’re so different than the traditional elevator where you push a button and you stop at every floor. And there’s lots of reasons for that. More efficient, easier to access. But what we’ve done is we created a barrier for people with visual disabilities and how they access everything, because everything’s like a digital keypad, right? And they aren’t physical. So we worked through the code to come up with standards that are more efficient for people with disabilities and people acknowledge we’re talking about the sound that’s there, the physical buttons, and when you hit it, it gets more time to access that elevator. So those are some of the things that we looked at in code that we push forward. That has certainly increased accessibility. And that’s what we’re talking about. Incremental changes that will get better. Of course I want to go in and just make everything better. But again, we have a lot of people in the room and we’ve got so much further in the code and I can only see it going further and further.

Kelly: 30:03
Right. And that elevator piece is such an excellent point because as things change for other reasons not related to accessibility or universal design, that are changing for efficiency, we then have to adapt the codes that relate to them to make sure that they’re accessible for all.

Victor: 30:24
And we talked about digital accessibility a little bit before technology and what we did with the destination elevators, right? At some degree, when we’re bringing in these new technologies as a whole, not just the elevators, we start to create a digital divide. We gatta kinda bring that back and say, well, if we’re going to digitize something, we have to make sure it’s accessible for people with disabilities. So that’s the reason why when we looked at the code and we had an opportunity to change these destination elevators, everyone came on and we didn’t do it in a bubble, right? We had people with disabilities that went out and actually tested the service with designers, manufacturers. They were there to witness what happened and how people got lost. Right? And we had everyone involved. We had people from research. And we wanted to make sure that what we’re putting forward was right. Not only for people with disabilities, for the people that are designing the elevators. We can’t create a digital divide. We have to ensure that it’s accessible for people with disabilities, but we need the input from people with disabilities and can’t do that without them.

Kelly: 31:42
Right. That’s an excellent point. And you spoke before to different perspectives on things. Everybody is going to come at that with a different perspective that will then hopefully make a solution that’s actually better for everyone. So what can I do and what can our listeners do to contribute and make a difference Today?

Victor: 32:03
We mentioned some of it earlier, right? Disability etiquette, right? Looking at people to hire, right? What is your HR practices and making sure that you’re hiring people with disabilities. Simple things. Do you have a Twitter? You have Instagram? Are you adding alt-texts describing the photos? Right? These are all simple little things. You think about it. Instagram is fully something that people look at with pictures. Well, a person with visual disability wants to know what those pictures are. Describe what that picture is, right? Those are simple little things that you can do to change things. And the perceptions of people with disabilities. And people with disabilities are not disabled, right? You could say, “Hey, you know, Victor, I’m looking at you right now and you’re in a wheelchair. You know that that appears to be a disability to me.” It’s like, okay, yeah, I could understand why you would say that, but what makes me disabled is not my wheelchair. It’s my environment, and when we start to change the environment to be accessible, the disabilities go away.

Kelly: 33:22
That’s an excellent point. That is a really great note to end on, but I will ask you one more question. What I like to ask is when we’re on this podcast again in five years talking, what will we be talking about? Then?

Victor: 33:40
Our goal and our vision is to make New York city the most accessible city in the world.

Kelly: 33:47
So we’ll just be talking about how great it is

Victor: 33:49
How much further we have gone and including accessibility and everything that the city has to offer.

Kelly: 33:56
All right. That’s great. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Speaker 5: 34:02
Thank you for listening to buildings and beyond. For more information about the topics discussed today. Visit www.swinter.com/podcast and check out the episode show notes. Buildings and beyond is brought to you by Steven winter associates. We provide energy, green building and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment our professionals have led the way since 1972 and the development of best practices to achieve high performance buildings. Our production team for today’s episode includes Dylan Martello, Alex Mirabile, and myself. Heather Breslin, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Jesse Thompson

Jesse is an award-winning architect who has become a national leader in green design and building science. Growing up in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, Jesse started his career working construction in high school. Since then, he’s been through every stage of design and building. Jesse is relentlessly practical, but he sees possibility for greatness in every project. He loves a good challenge. Jesse’s always working on balancing elements—engineering with art and design, beauty with affordability, function with potential.

Jesse is a graduate of the University of Oregon, current President Elect of AIA Maine, and a former board member of the Portland Society for Architecture. He’s a founding member of Passivhaus Maine, and was the first architect in northern New England to become a Certified Passive House Consultant. Read more

As building professionals, we often ask ourselves, “what are the most critical components to a high-performance building?” Portland, Maine based architect and building science expert, Jesse Thompson, will tell you it’s air-sealing and ventilation.

On this episode of Buildings and Beyond, Jesse explains the importance of incorporating as many Passive House principles as possible when designing multifamily buildings. His focus on air-sealing and ventilation allows him to effectively maximize building performance, reduce energy use, and increase comfort. Leveraging those strategies, Jesse and his team have completed many noteworthy high-performance buildings in some of the most challenging climates.

Other Relevant Resources:

ASHRAE 62.2 is a standard that sets minimum ventilation requirements for achieving acceptable indoor air quality. Balanced ventilation in multifamily was a big theme in this episode, and there’s a change being proposed to Standard 62.2 that would limit exhaust-only ventilation in multifamily buildings and instead say that balanced or supply ventilation should be used. If you have strong feelings on this, it’s open to public comment until October 21. Here’s the proposed amendment and link to submit the comment (you’ll need to create a Log In to do so).

Send your feedback and questions to [email protected]

Buildings and Beyond is the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Buildings and Beyond is a production of Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building, and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. For more information, visit swinter.com.

Hosts: Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby

Production Team: Heather Breslin | Alex Mirabile | Dylan Martello

Kelly: (00:01)
Welcome to buildings and beyond.

Robb: (00:09)
The podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment.

Kelly: (00:13)
By focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Robb: (00:18)
I’m Robb Aldrich.

Kelly: (00:19)
And I’m Kelly Westby.

Robb: (00:22)
For this episode I talked with Jesse Thompson who is a principal at Kaplan Thompson architects in Portland, Maine. I saw him present at a conference about a year ago. It was a great session called stealth passive house or something along those lines. And the idea was people can be intimidated about passive house they can hear about r-100 roofs or very expensive windows. The certification can be complicated, so quite a few people are put off by it, but in a lot of his work in multifamily buildings, Jesse really integrates a lot of the key, the core components of passive house into the projects, namely air sealing and ventilation. They’re really fundamental to good buildings and by incorporating these elements on the sly as it were, a lot of his projects perform very near passive house levels. So it was a great conversation. I started out asking him about air sealing, but Jesse wanted to start with ventilation

Jesse: (01:29)
Over the last few years I’ve felt like we were inside the home performance industry or whatever we call this, there was this phrase that was rattling around called “build tight and ventilate right.” And we’ve gotten really sure over the last couple of years that we had that a hundred percent backwards. That what we should have been saying is ventilate right, and then you can build tight. That we you know, start with the fresh air, start with good ventilation, and then after you’ve got people happy and healthy inside of the building, then you can get to work air ceiling.

Robb: (02:03)
So what is good ventilation for these projects? What does it consist of? Usually.

Jesse: (02:11)
It usually has a fully ducted heat recovery ventilation system. You know, a box maybe on the roof. Maybe at the end of the hallway, maybe inside each apartment. And that machine is bringing in fresh air and it’s exhausting all of the pollutants from the kitchen and the bathroom. And it’s capturing the heat. So the heat isn’t leaving the apartment, but all the nasty stuff is and there’s always fresh air coming in and supplying it. It’s a balanced system always in a passive house. And it’s always has heat recovery and that heat recovery is way better than we thought we needed 10 or 15 years ago. It’s at least over 80% of the heat recovery. It’s a really good heat recovery device.

Robb: (03:00)
And they’ve been around for a long time.For the 20 years that I’ve been in this industry and I have seen some repeated problems with getting systems installed, operated and maintained to keep up with that. Even on day one, it’s doubtful that the system has the performance you want without some tinkering or retrocommissioning or something. Are you finding that these systems work, that contractors are getting used to them so that they do work more reliably and I guess I’ll ask you about maintenance after that.

Jesse: (03:48)
Yeah, I think this is a, this is the big challenge is that the boxes are easy to buy even though you always have to do some sort of pitched battle over buying a good enough box. But these are complicated things that weave their way through buildings that we may or may not be used to doing well. And I think that is one of the areas where we feel like passive house and energy star have done incredible work at getting people to really test the systems and find out where they really working or not. There’s a lot of sort of faith-based construction in our industry where you know, the game is to cover things up as fast as they can and move on to the next building. It’s not to test to see if it’s working and to really see it. Most people are just trying to get onto the next one. 5So that’s just an industry endemic across the board. And then you combine it with a kind of system that maybe folks aren’t quite as used to doing well. And then you have all these weird things, you know, exhaustingly systems aside, like we, you talked to folks in, you’re starting to talk about a building and you’re talking to, maybe it’s a mechanical engineer you haven’t worked with. Maybe it’s a contractor and it’s okay, we’re gonna put the air in the middle of the living room and then we need a heating coil to heat the air up cause it’s gonna be cold coming in from outside. So we have to buy a heating coil and then we have to pay attention to where we put it. And then we’re going to dump it all in the living room and extract from the kitchen to save money.

Jesse: (05:16)
And so even then you get these systems that frankly probably don’t work very well. And then you get someone who complains about it and then the owner says, boy, I don’t know why we did that. Let’s stop doing that. Let’s go back to the bath fan way. At least we didn’t get complaints there.

Robb: (05:28)
And what a big premium, what a big cost premium. Installed costs of an ERV or HRV versus a bath fan.

Jesse: (05:35)
So yeah, that’s where I appreciate where the passive house folks got much more rigorous where they said, no, we will make sure there is fresh air into bedrooms. Like when the teenagers in there with their doors shut, they’re still getting fresh air. We’re not gonna put fresh air in the living room and pretend that magically somehow works its way into the bedroom where the person’s in there have their door shut. Like, no, we’re going to put fresh air where people sleep. And you’re just going to do that. You’re not going to cheap out and you’re going to do such a good heat recovery box that you don’t have to add a bunch of electric coils all through the buildings and add a bunch of costs. You know, you don’t need to do that kind of thinking. We’re going to both make sure it really works and make it simpler. So those have been refreshing and they definitely take some pushing though. But there’s also this bizarre thing where I think multifamily buildings have these systems that never worked, but are code legal, I think the bath fan exhaust system, it kept buildings from rotting out. It kept moisture out of bathrooms, but by no means got fresh air to where people were. And so there’s a funny thing where I think we have a code that prevents people from rotting out building but doesn’t make people healthier. And there’s a whole code path that’s very inexpensive to do. It’s legal, but it doesn’t work.

Robb: (06:51)
So yeah. And oh my god, there’s a huge debate about that everywhere, even within our office. I mean, there are people in our office that are pushing strongly for, for mandating unbalanced ventilation in multifamily buildings. Balance doesn’t necessarily mean heat recovery, but once you go to balanced, might as well push on to energy recovery. But personally, my biggest hangup is that I agree that exhaust only ventilation has some big potential problems. Some big potential question marks. It’s better than no ventilation, often, maybe even usually, but there’s no rigor in guaranteeing that fresh air gets to occupants.

Jesse: (07:45)
Yeah that funny thing where it’s like, we will build it just tight enough that code says we don’t have to have balanced ventilation. And so we’l leave just enough holes. I mean, no one is putting the holes where the people are first of all. And you know, there’s no pretending that it works. And there’s funny thing where, you know, the passive house folks have this reputation for crazy air sealing. And when I go around every American city, I see peel and stick membranes on every building. I see, you know, Blue Skin and Carlisle products on everywhere. So people are building incredibly tight buildings everywhere.

Robb: (08:26)
Way more. Yeah. Way more.

Jesse: (08:29)
Just the building products are so different than what you were doing 20 years ago. So that to me is a little wacky where we’re, we’re still pretending that those buildings are not airtight. When I’m looking at those products saying they’re an inch away from being a passive house, they just haven’t thought it through and the air’s coming from The parking garage and the elevator shaft.

Robb: (08:47)
I totally agree. Exhaust only doesn’t work.

Jesse: (08:53)
Totally. It doesn’t work to make people happy. It keeps the buildings from rotting. I think it’s successful at that part.

Robb: (08:59)
But are you finding that your ERVs or HRVs are working? Are they installed, Commissioned? That’s hangup cause I see bad installations so often. And then lack of maintenance. These systems require more maintenance than exhaust only.

Jesse: (09:17)
Well that’s the hard thing is, we’re in one of those step changes where we’re making our buildings perform a lot better and they’re getting more complicated at the same time. And we’ve done this before, like we do these moments when you go from a two by four wall to an engineered system or we start rain screening or all the other things that we’ve done in buildings that make them work better, but sure they’re more complicated and it’s, yeah, it’s hard. You do have to put a bunch of effort effort in when you’re at that transition point and you have to figure out what to push on. And that’s kind of grinding work, you know, making sure someone made their fresh air system work, like that’s not very glamorous.

Robb: (10:02)
But you’re finding you’re finding that are succeeding?

Jesse: (10:07)
After people put a lot of effort into them. Our very first passive house building we couldn’t get certified for I think it took, it took a while because one kitchen exhaust louver, the duct wasn’t connected to the grill and it just took so long to hunt it down. Like it took multiple testing. It took a person getting access to an apartment to go look into realize that, Oh, that thing isn’t connected to that thing. And we didn’t get certified for quite a long time because of one kitchen in a 45 unit building. But, you know, if the client hadn’t tried to be passive house, it never would have gotten found. Right. No one ever would’ve fixed that kitchen. Yep.

Robb: (10:47)
Yeah. No ventilation from that kitchen at all. Right.

Jesse: (10:50)
So yeah, it was incredibly hard to get it there, but we got it there and that took rigor.

Robb: (10:57)
Yeah. And that’s something that I’ve been involved in. Just measuring the performance of systems when they’re installed, and especially new systems especially, you know, especially if it’s new to the contractor or new to the builder and the developer, there’s a learning curve with all of it for everybody.

Jesse: (11:17)
The building industry is a really strange industry where our quality control standards, compared to the automotive industry, or any product industry where they make thousands of the same thing, they have quality control that is rigorous, that checks everything, you know, and that has a way of chasing out flaws. And here we are in this weird business where every single one we do is different. Every building’s a prototype. You know, and we don’t have rigorous quality control standards quite frankly.

Robb: (11:48)
So for you, are you and your projects are getting to a point where every Building is not a prototype, that there’s enough, I don’t want to say standardization, but similar systems that it’s getting easier?

Jesse: (12:05)
You’re getting back to the talk you saw about the stealth passive house and that’s what we were really talking about is that, so here we are, we’re architects. We aren’t building scientists, we aren’t researchers. We aren’t on that field. We’re trying to design beautiful buildings that our clients love. And then we got into this, trying to make better buildings technically, and I would say yes on the multifamily buildings. We tried out a bunch of things four or five years ago and we’ve settled into for buildings of a certain scale, a thing that kind of works. And it has quieted down where we’re starting to draw the same wall every time. We’re starting to think the ventilation systems are probably pretty similar, and it’s allowed us to focus on architecture a little bit more again, because we maybe are a little bit over that technical hump where we can, yeah, it is funny. We can look at a building if it’s in the two to four stories tall, wood frame, four to five stories tall on in the Northeast like Oh we can make that, we can get that to passive house. Throw a six, eight, 10 story building at us and we’ll be pretty lost. We arent big city architects. But if you’re in wood frame five stories max, Yeah, I could probably rattle off the five things we need to do to make a building a passive house.

Robb: (13:27)
Could you rattle off the five things you need to do to make your building a passive house? Y

Jesse: (13:32)
Right. There’s a test, you know, in the Northeast we build out of wood, we are probably a two by six wall with exterior installation. That’s about two to three inches thick. There is probably a roof that’s about, you know, r40 to 50. We are stringently air sealed. We have a heat recovery ventilation system that is either on the roof or at the end of the hallways that’s doing a block of 10 to 15 apartments in one unit and it’s got at least 80% heat recovery on it. Triple glazed windows. Probably if we’re in affordable housing, it’s fiberglass or vinyl. If it’s in a nicer building, you know, it’s just, it’s a nicer triple glazed window. I would say that right there gets us 85-90% of the way. You know, if you’re in a peculiar orientation where you’re all facing West and we’re starting to look really carefully at air conditioning issues, that one is really a tricky one.

Robb: (14:36)
Yeah, I was going to ask you about heating and cooling. Is there a standard for that, for this kind of building typology?

Jesse: (14:44)
Well, if you’re doing a really, really good building, I think one of the things that’s been so funny for us is you know, these intricate technical programs like passive house are hard to kind of get your arms around. And one of the ways I think that was really, really effective for us was I, I went back to kind of some of the first stuff I ever learned and they said, Oh, passive house, it’s a heating load of one watt per square foot. And that kinda stuck for me. I was like, okay, wait. All right, I get this. Like a bedroom is a 10 by 10 in affordable housing, a hundred square feet. So a hundred watt light bulb, heats a bedroom on the worst day of the year. Okay. I can get my head around that. Like, yeah, you’ve got a 600 square foot apartment and you need 600 Watts of heat. Yeah, okay. That’s like that little portable heater they use on construction sites. or you might use in your attic like, Oh 600 watt heater. Like that’s the heating system for that apartment. And that was kind of this radical thing of what’s the thing that can keep an apartment warm? And that gets you down to this funny realization that you can do it with electric resistance. You know, electric baseboard like they did in the Pacific Northwest works pretty awesome in a passive house and it’s super simple. And how’s the thermostat? But you know, it doesn’t air condition your building, but that’s the territory you’re in. It’s just this crazy jump down. But that was funny for me was having this thing stuck in my head of, Oh, it should be about one watt per square foot. Like I can talk to a mechanical engineer about it and I’m not a mechanical engineer, I’m just an architect.

Jesse: (16:18)
But I can like ask them, are we close to that? And they, they should be able to give me that number. You know, that sort of plain talk has been part of it of like, Oh, these buildings should be one watt per square foot, which is radically tiny. I mean it just this minuscule amount of heat.

Robb: (16:41)
Yeah. It’s a big game changer. It really, it really is.

Jesse: (16:44)
It’s just so tiny. It’s hard to wrap your head around it.

Robb: (16:47)
I agree. Yeah. And we’ve seen, you know, we’ve had success with really very efficient, very efficient buildings without needing to distribute heat, you know, a point source heater and a central space. You know, you turn on the light and a bedroom and the gains from a person being in the bedroom heats the bedroom. It’s a game changer.

Jesse: (17:07)
And so that takes you to air conditioning. So if you can heat a building with a hundred watt light bulb, boy, it must not be that hard to overheat. Is it? Huh? Like point that window towards the sunset on August and yeah, you could probably get kind of hot in there. Even in Maine or Northern Vermont, right? Yeah. So even in Maine, you must be seeing more need for air conditioning in passive house. Yeah, and I guess of course it’s not just passive house. Everybody’s got air conditioners now. All my neighbors have air conditioners even in Maine now, and they didn’t in the 70s. So that’s just changed across the board where people’s expectations are different, I think than they used to be. But in apartment buildings in Maine with the worry that summers are going to get even hotter coming up. Yeah. I think we need to be planning for air conditioning in every apartment building.

Robb: (18:01)
And are you? Even affordable housing where that has not been standard? Are they coming to a realization that maybe they need to?

Jesse: (18:10)
They very much want to. There are pretty severe budget limits in our state that are, we’re still going without. But I think if you talked to any affordable housing developer in Northern New England and asked them, on your new buildings, are you running into overheating? And they will probably nod and say, yeah, we’ve had some real struggles like high humidity. I mean are you seeing it? This isn’t the passive house thing. This is just a new building thing in Northern new England. People are getting over heating in their apartment buildings.

Robb: (18:47)
And so are you going to heat pumps? I’ve even seen some projects with window air conditioners, that are borderline passive house.

Jesse: (19:00)
I mean, we’re definitely trying to do heat humps because they’re so much better. They use so much less electricity than electric resistance. We are a pretty frugal state. I mean people are being asked to build buildings in the $160 to $170 a square foot range for affordable housing. And today that’s pretty, pretty tough to build anything for that cost in our area. But it’s the best the target the state agencies are asking people to work for. So there are just these huge budget challenges in 2019 building anything. But so that aside we have heat pumps and then we’ve got these engineers we work with who are pushing us really, really hard to go back to hydronics and to go back to hot and cold water loops instead of heat pumps, which is kind of interesting.

Jesse: (19:50)
well, what are their reasons?

Jesse: (19:54)
Their reasons are interesting. One of their main reasons is they say, so the refrigerant, whatever we’re using now, and I don’t know what refrigerant we use now, they say we’ve been through like three refrigerant changes in the last 30 years and we’re probably got another one. So owner, you’re going to put a thing in your building where all the stuff that makes it work is going to be obsolete and probably illegal in another 10 years. So there’s a little bit of a planned obsolescence. They are also pushing us that they are saying, you know, these heat pumps might only be a 20 year life span. That they just aren’t expected to last very long as pieces of machinery. And when you have a 40 unit building and you’ve got a whole lot of these machines that can get pretty complicated and it’s hard to downsize them far enough still and refrigerant leakage, they, I mean, they sort of rattle off these reasons. And they’re pushing us to go back to the sort of very simple fan coil systems of a hot water loop and a Coldwater loop because they’re saying, okay, so you changed the box on the outside of the building, but you only change one of them and it, if it fails in 20 years, you put a new magic super efficient thing that didn’t exist when you design the building. But it’s still water running through the building. It’s still, it’s like it’s future proof is what they say. So that’s been kind of interesting push.

Robb: (21:09)
We’re seeing that too. And there’s no silver bullet. I mean he pumps can work great. I have tested many. I’ve tested many that have not, I’ve tested many that have worked great. The durability, the long term viability, the refrigerant phase out, the refrigerant leakage. Those are all big question marks that I don’t know that anybody has a perfect answer to. But yeah, as far as, I mean, as far as first cost for heating and cooling, with a single system, it seems in buildings with very modest loads, it seems like, it seems like that would be appealing. Is, is that accurate for your clients?

Jesse: (21:54)
Yeah, the clients I think are pretty happy to have someone who seems to know what they’re doing pushing for something. And I think they do have, most people have hot water baseboard buildings that seem to work pretty well. They may not love the costs they get them, but they don’t think of them as failing. The buildings they own here in our area. And yes, a lot of clients want to not be using fossil fuels and they probably, you know, okay, I guess there’s a gas system running that and that’s not great.

Robb: (22:23)
But For now. You know that that plant might be able to be replaced with a much more efficient, lower carbon emission device.

Jesse: (22:38)
Yeah. Easier than retrofitting a 40 unit building and ripping out all the heat pumps.

Robb: (22:41)
This is true. This is true. It’s, it’s not crazy.

Jesse: (22:45)
So yeah, we’ve, we’ve got a building right now that’s a 65 unit building and we are looking at electric resistance heat and a cooling loop that runs through the whole building. And it, it’s only gonna air condition in the living room, living spaces. It’s not going to air condition the bedrooms. That’s how we’re going to keep costs down. And we’re gonna have one little tiny fan coil and the living room of every apartment. So it’s affordable housing. And so, you know, your living room will be nice and cool and if it’s a really hot night, you’re going to keep your bedroom doors open, turn on a fan. And I think, you know, we’re looking at, it seems to be like, ah, it’s like 320 it’s like $5,000 a unit to get this system into the whole building. And it’s definitely cheaper than a VRF fancy computer controlled commercial heat pump system.

Robb: (23:34)
Yup. Yeah. And so there’s a central chiller, is there?

Jesse: (23:38)
A central chiller. Yup

Robb: (23:39)
Okay. So, yeah, totally viable. It’s frustrating to have loads that are so small and still still struggle to find really simple.

Jesse: (23:49)
And the other thing our engineers love is like when you only need a tiny, tiny bit of heating and cooling, a water system can deliver a tiny little bit of heating and cooling. Infinitely small. I can just keep going and they’re persuasive folks and you know, okay. We’ll try it. But yeah, I mean it is. Yeah, you’re right. Cause it is this funny thing where you end up in these bizarre little rabbit hole conversations. The great thing is, is that we’re just seeing that the, if you can pull off these passive house buildings, they’re just so incredibly economical to run. Yeah. The first one we did that we have measured numbers and it’s like $60 per apartment per month, heating, cooling, hot water, and absolutely everything. All electric bills, like every single bit of energy, $60 a month to run an apartment. That’s, that’s amazing. Very happy clients. And they also say that the costs are much closer to the modeled expectation than all the LEED buildings and all of the other like performance programs they try, they’re saying it, you know, these passive house buildings are running closer to what the, the fancy design teams told them it might be than any other system. Much less variance, which I think is interesting. It gets back to that testing, you know that like, it’s about the only program that forces you to test the damn building and find out if it worked or not. And then if it triggers Energy Star, so you have to do all the energy star or the energy star stuff is the great stuff.

Robb: (25:28)
So the energy star for homes, with the kind of the quality control throughout the construction design and construction process.

Jesse: (25:36)
Yeah. Somebody like looking at the installation, looking at the building and staring at every wall. That’s, that’s the great testing. That’s where owners get hit. There’s so much money out of that. So much value out of that for the money they spend.

Robb: (25:48)
And they appreciate that?

Jesse: (25:49)
I hope so. It sure is about the biggest bang for the buck they’re getting.

Robb: (26:00)
Did the owners see that or are they kind of a little bit divorced from that whole process where, you know, insulators are being called out or air sealers are being called out about something.

Jesse: (26:12)
I mean, they’re definitely getting these memos that are usually saying like, Hey, somebody didn’t do something right and we caught it. You gotta appreciate that.

Robb: (26:23)
We do a lot of ratings and some people are only in it for the incentive. Others utility incentives. So I have to hire a rater. Ugh. It’s like, you know, they’re not happy. But then we have some clients repeat clients who, who really do see the value in, you know, that layer of quality control that they’re not, they wouldn’t be getting otherwise. I mean, code building inspectors, they don’t, they can’t get into that level of detail. The code doesn’t get into that level of detail.

Jesse: (26:58)
Yeah, it’s really interesting. And yeah, it’s been a funny journey over the last years, but we are definitely to the point where we’re starting to work on a lot of buildings all over. So we managed to have success early on in Maine with sort of a passive house building that was a decent scale. And now we’ve got calls from New Hampshire and Connecticut and Massachusetts and Maine and we’re doing projects all over and a lot of it is being driven by affordable housing and state agencies saying you know, we will score projects well in our competitive rounds that try that pledge to make a passive house. And so we’ve got folks calling us. So it’s pretty great because it’s seeing a lot of better buildings getting built really quickly.

Robb: (27:46)
Excellent. So is really most of your business high performance if not certified or going in that direction?

Jesse: (27:56)
Yeaah, yeah, it is. Absolutely. I think our business is I would say it’s half single family homes, new in renovation. And another chunk of multifamily. The multifamily is not the biggest thing we do. I’d really say it’s, it’s homes for people is the biggest thing we do. We also do a bunch of restaurant work and high performance restaurant work is, that’s a weird one. Yeah. So everything we’re doing is high performance.We have pledged to the AIA’s climate change goals and we’ve signed on that this idea that everything we do will be carbon neutral by 2030, which is a little scary cause that’s only 11 years away. But yeah, I think we know what looking at, we actually measure every project we do and we check it against the targets. And last year I think we had like on average 70% reduction over sort of the American baseline on projects across the board. We’re definitely getting some kind of amazing successes I think by this focus.

Robb: (29:02)
That’s a pretty cool statistic right there. That’s awesome.

Jesse: (29:06)
And you know, admittedly we don’t tackle the super hard things like college laboratories, you know, or hospitals, things that are crazily energy intensive. But We’ve definitely figured some things out. I think it feels like, and trying to spread the word.

Robb: (29:24)
Absolutely. And your single family clients, did they come to you because they want high performance?

Jesse: (29:33)
Well, it’s definitely something that we tell people we do. And I mean our tagline is beautiful, sustainable, attainable. So I’m sure we are definitely attracting folks who are looking for it. But yeah, I think to us, every house we do should be able to be net zero. If it isn’t, we must be doing something wrong. And honestly, the single family houses, I guess we were talking to a minute ago, multifamily is still in this really huge learning curve moment It feels like where a lot of people are trying a lot of things. And I hope in 10 years we look back and it’ll be a solved problem. To us, the single family is kind of looking like a bit of a solved problem. Like it’s not particularly hard to make a net zero home, a heat pump water heater, some air source heat pumps, make the walls r30 to r40 and air seal it well and you’ve probably got a net zero home. Like, you know, it’s nuts. Net Zero energy just isn’t very hard with single family homes. Solving the transportation, you know, there’s plenty of other hard things about it, but that, that part should be pretty easy.

Robb: (30:42)
Yeah, yeah. I agree. Single-family new construction is one of the easiest things to do, yeah.

Jesse: (30:49)
But 15 years ago it wasn’t, I mean it was a complete like head-scratcher. But in 2019, yeah, it’s like, you know, when I, when I’m out in the world talking or something and someone starts asking about like, well, what wall assembly are you using? And it’s like, look, it’s 2019, if you can’t Google five high performance wall systems, you’re not trying. Like you don’t need me to tell you what wall to do here. Just Google it.

Robb: (31:15)
That’s cool to hear that, that we’ve gotten there. I mean I dont hear that enough, but I agree it’s becoming more and more understood. Well understood more and more. You know, you look at, you look at details, you look at sections, you see their ceiling. I mean that’s part of sets now. I mean that’s, people know that they have to pay attention to that stuff.

Jesse: (31:47)
Go do what building science Corp says to do. Okay. Oh, you don’t want to use foam? Okay. Go do what the other people say to do. Okay.Yeah, there’s lots of resources out there in single-family world, but the multifamily is complicated. You have lots of different users with crazily different needs. You have urban sites, you have bigger scale. You’ve got different machinery. And yeah, and a really tough cost environment so it’s, yeah, it’s not quite a solved problem yet, but it feels like we’re getting closer.

Robb: (32:16)
Yeah. You feel like you guys have your own method for a specific building type a, but industry wide you’re not seeing that become standardized?

Jesse: (32:27)
No, I don’t think so. And I guess that’s why the stealth passive house talk, I felt like we were really trying to push people on a couple key things that were really eye opening for us. And one was that we’ve really been working hard to reverse this idea that passive house is about really thick insulation. And that’s why we’re so focused on really get the ventilation right and then work on the air ceiling. And honestly, you’ve probably done 70% of the heavy lifting at that point. And when we we’re doing these energy models and we first saw it and we were sort of turning all these dials, it was kind of this amazing thing that it was like the installation wasn’t doing the work. And I was like, I couldn’t really get it at first. And then I was sitting with a mechanical engineer. I said, okay, wait, so you’ve got like 50 cubic feet per minute in an apartment is like the ventilation rate. So you’ve got 50 cubic feet coming in, 50 cubic feet coming out, you’ve got a 40 unit building. Like okay, yeah, so you have 2000 cubic feet of air moving 24 hours a day, 100% of the time. I was like, that sounds like a lot of air. They’re like, yeah, that’s a lot of air. Like this is a tornado blowing through the building 24 hours a day, and then we first did these building, we stood next to the machine that was moving air. It’s like, wow, that machine is working really hard. Like you’re right. There was a lot of air moving through this building. It was like, and then it was this idea that apartment buildings have a lot of people living in close proximity and there’s a lot of air moving through there to keep the building fresh and healthy and there’s a wind blowing through the building. So if you have a really good heat recovery box, you are absolutely doing the right thing. Just cause the quantity of air moving. You know, that’s the biggest driving force and that’s why you have to have really, really good heat recovery stuff.

Robb: (34:17)
Yeah Infiltration and ventilation. Certainly the biggest, the biggest pieces.

Jesse: (34:22)
And after that, you know, make sure you don’t do them. Things like connects steel from the inside to the outside. Make sure you’re totally thermally broken with at least, you know, r10 to r15 to r20 and you’re probably getting there. And the other funny thing that we realized is that every project team is just used to fighting over insulation. I guess just this classic thing you do, like you designed the building, it’s over budget. You take all the insulation off the building, and it’s this ritual dance where like the contractor knows that you do that first and everybody’s used to it. And so we were kind of realizing that you can’t do that with air sealing. You can’t look at the owner and say we need to air seal it a lot less. We’re going to save you money because you know, if you look at them and you say, well, okay, so how much money and how much less better are you gonna make it? Or if they say like, Oh, all that air, something’s going to cost a lot of shit. Well what do I get for free? They don’t always have a good answer about what they get for free because most people can’t quantify it. So you get this very different cost reduction question when if someone says like, Oh, that passive house air ceiling is really expensive. It’s like, okay, well then give us only half passive house.

Robb: (35:46)
What is that Jessie?

Jesse: (35:48)
Exactly they don’t know either. So it’s been a different thing where everybody knows how to take triple glazed windows out of a project. Everyone knows how to take half the insulation off a building. Yeah. It’s like everybody’s good at that. So when you can do these buildings that have code levels of insulation, there’s nothing left to take.

Robb: (36:06)
Right, right. Yeah. And I’ve seen it, you know, code levels of insulation with the rigorous air sealing and the excellent ventilation get you to passive house levels.

Jesse: (36:17)
Yeah. Especially the bigger the building gets, right? The bigger the building, the more the forces are going in that direction. So yeah, it’s been really interesting for us. It’s been taking the focus off and that’s what I had been going, you know, if I’m talking to folks about one thing, it’s this, it’s like your, your ventilation equipment that your engineers doing is probably nowhere near good enough.

Jesse: (36:35)
Like you really need really good stuff so that the folks aren’t freezing in their bedrooms. Again, someone explained to me, So if you buy a 50% effective ventilation unit and it’s zero out and 70 inside, the air coming into your bedroom is 35 degrees. That’s pretty cold. Like I don’t want to be 50% of the way to zero, but if you’re 85% efficient, you know, that air coming in the bedroom is at 60, Oh 60 that sounds a lot better. And those kinds of levers are things that are really worth working on that if you, cause if you stop at 50 and you do that standard stuff, you don’t get the benefits.

Jesse: (37:16)
Yeah. That’s good. You’ve learned, you’ve learned the buttons to push a little bit too.

Jesse: (37:24)
Yeah. I mean, you know, half of it is these funny little like tidbits you just put in a meetings. I do think the big thing that’s going to change is when people start asking for great ventilation systems in their apartments. So when condo buyers start asking about like, Oh, so what kind of ventilation system does this apartment have? You know, that’s when the market turns inside condominiums when people really start asking. And I think it’s when people become really attuned about asthma and urban environments with their kids. And you know, that’s, that sort of health consciousness is what’s gonna really change. Another piece of construction in America is when homeowners and you know, that’s what I really would tell to every homeowner who’s even thinking about buying a house or a condo. Like, Oh, what’s going to get me fresh air in the bedrooms when my kids are sleeping? And is it going to be filtered?

Robb: (38:19)
I’m not arguing that that would be a really a change. But are you, are you even starting to see that? I’m not sure that we see that in any scale.

Jesse: (38:30)
I don’t think we’re there yet, but I think it’s coming pretty soon because we had a building recently. And it was a condominium project. So the realtor was in the building and you know, the team was really struggling. They were like, why do you keep saying we need to have this ventilation system. They really looked at us and they said, no one else in town is doing this. Why do you say we have to do this? And you say things like, cause it will work and the other thing they’re doing doesn’t work. And they really didn’t like that answer cause they were selling the other thing. And finally the realtor did say, she’s like, you know, a lot of these buyers are really health conscious. She’s like, I think I can sell that. I can tell people that there’s a feature that you have fresh filtered air in all the rooms of your apartment. And I think people will buy this over the other thing.

Robb: (39:15)
So she like came around just in one, in one kind of meeting with you.

Jesse: (39:21)
Oh no it wasnt one, it was like 6. Six of us trying every single trick we had to try to convince them to do it, but it was, that was the one where she finally said like, yeah, that I can do. That we’ll get that will bring people around. Cause she just had two young kids and she was thinking about it, but she was thinking about her own house all of a sudden. So yeah. But it is person by person. Yes. A giant marketing campaign would be wonderful by the American Fresh Air Society or someone.

Robb: (39:45)
That’ll be a big step. SoI usually wrap up with like asking, you know, what are we going to see five years down the road? But you already started us on this line of conversation. Do you think that, you know, that we’re going to see more high performance as far as efficiency, as far as sustainability, as far as carbon emissions being driven by health concerns on the residential side?

Jesse: (40:15)
I don’t know, cause I’m no sort of trend master or anything like that. I do know that all the health stuff sweeps through everybody, you know, like gluten free sweeps through the country. You know, these things do catch fire. I think the work in the affordable housing community and the take up of passive house is really amazing and it’s, it seems to be happening really quickly, where, yeah, it’s changing an industry really fast and I think we’ll get some really good buildings coming out of the next 5 to 10 years in that sector. And then I think other building owners, I think university dormitories are happening pretty quickly. They’re jumping on it as well. Yup. People who own buildings a long time are hearing that there’s a thing out there that seems to be working pretty well. So that group of folks I think is catching on pretty quick. Cool. Yeah. Cool.

Robb: (41:15)
Thank you Jesse. Thanks very much. If you want to hear more from Jesse on this and you can make it to Portland, Maine later in October, Jesse’s going to be talking about the IAQ and energy conference on October 31, Halloween 2019 I’ve been to that conference a several times and it’s a really, really good conference. I will probably be there. There’s a link on our website or you can go to IAQ and energy.com everything spelled out, a N D spelled out. Also, if there are any multifamily ventilation geeks listening, there’s a proposed amendment to ASHRAE standards 62.2 that’s the standard that deals with residential ventilation and this amendment would limit where exhaust only ventilation could be used in multifamily buildings. The idea is this would get more fresh air getting to dwelling spaces more consistently. That amendment is open for comment until October 21st I believe 2019 we’ll put a link on our website or you can find more details on ashrae.org thanks.

Speaker 4: (42:31)
Thank you for listening to buildings and beyond. For more information about the topics discussed today. Visit www dot [inaudible] dot com slash podcast and check out the episode show notes. Buildings and beyond is brought to you by Steven winter associates. We provide energy, green building and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment our professionals have led the way since 1972 and the development of best practices to achieve high performance buildings. Our production team for today’s episode includes Dylan Martello, Alex [inaudible], and myself. Heather Breslin, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.

As building professionals, we often ask ourselves, “what are the most critical components to a high-performance building?” Portland, Maine based architect and building science expert, Jesse Thompson, will tell you it’s air-sealing and ventilation.

On this episode of Buildings and Beyond, Jesse explains the importance of incorporating as many Passive House principles as possible when designing multifamily buildings. His focus on air-sealing and ventilation allows him to effectively maximize building performance, reduce energy use, and increase comfort. Leveraging those strategies, Jesse and his team have completed many noteworthy high-performance buildings in some of the most challenging climates.

Episode Guest: Jesse Thompson

Jesse is an award-winning architect who has become a national leader in green design and building science. Growing up in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, Jesse started his career working construction in high school. Since then, he’s been through every stage of design and building. Jesse is relentlessly practical, but he sees possibility for greatness in every project. He loves a good challenge. Jesse’s always working on balancing elements—engineering with art and design, beauty with affordability, function with potential.

Jesse is a graduate of the University of Oregon, current President Elect of AIA Maine, and a former board member of the Portland Society for Architecture. He’s a founding member of Passivhaus Maine, and was the first architect in northern New England to become a Certified Passive House Consultant.

Episode Information & Resources

Other Relevant Resources:

ASHRAE 62.2 is a standard that sets minimum ventilation requirements for achieving acceptable indoor air quality. Balanced ventilation in multifamily was a big theme in this episode, and there’s a change being proposed to Standard 62.2 that would limit exhaust-only ventilation in multifamily buildings and instead say that balanced or supply ventilation should be used. If you have strong feelings on this, it’s open to public comment until October 21. Here’s the proposed amendment and link to submit the comment (you’ll need to create a Log In to do so).

Interested in becoming a Certified Passive House Designer/Consultant? Check out NAPHN’s upcoming training schedule!

*Available in various locations across the nation and every other month in NYC!

Send your feedback and questions to [email protected]

Buildings and Beyond is a production of Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building, and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. For more information, visit www.swinter.com.

Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby

Heather Breslin | Alex Mirabile | Dylan Martello

Victor Calise, Commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities

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Kelly:                                  00:01                   Welcome to buildings and beyond.

Robb:                                00:09                   The podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment.

Kelly:                                  00:13                   By focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Robb:                                00:18                   I’m Robb Aldrich.

Kelly:                                  00:19                   And I’m Kelly Westby.

Robb:                                00:22                   For this episode I talked with Jesse Thompson who is a principal at Kaplan Thompson architects in Portland, Maine. I saw him present at a conference about a year ago. It was a great session called stealth passive house or something along those lines. And the idea was people can be intimidated about passive house they can hear about r-100 roofs or very expensive windows. The certification can be complicated, so quite a few people are put off by it, but in a lot of his work in multifamily buildings, Jesse really integrates a lot of the key, the core components of passive house into the projects, namely air sealing and ventilation. They’re really fundamental to good buildings and by incorporating these elements on the sly as it were, a lot of his projects perform very near passive house levels. So it was a great conversation. I started out asking him about air sealing, but Jesse wanted to start with ventilation

Jesse:                                 01:29                   Over the last few years I’ve felt like we were inside the home performance industry or whatever we call this, there was this phrase that was rattling around called “build tight and ventilate right.” And we’ve gotten really sure over the last couple of years that we had that a hundred percent backwards. That what we should have been saying is ventilate right, and then you can build tight. That we you know, start with the fresh air, start with good ventilation, and then after you’ve got people happy and healthy inside of the building, then you can get to work air ceiling.

Robb:                                02:03                   So what is good ventilation for these projects? What does it consist of? Usually.

Jesse:                                 02:11                   It usually has a fully ducted heat recovery ventilation system. You know, a box maybe on the roof. Maybe at the end of the hallway, maybe inside each apartment. And that machine is bringing in fresh air and it’s exhausting all of the pollutants from the kitchen and the bathroom. And it’s capturing the heat. So the heat isn’t leaving the apartment, but all the nasty stuff is and there’s always fresh air coming in and supplying it. It’s a balanced system always in a passive house. And it’s always has heat recovery and that heat recovery is way better than we thought we needed 10 or 15 years ago. It’s at least over 80% of the heat recovery. It’s a really good heat recovery device.

Robb:                                03:00                   And they’ve been around for a long time.For the 20 years that I’ve been in this industry and I have seen some repeated problems with getting systems installed, operated and maintained to keep up with that. Even on day one, it’s doubtful that the system has the performance you want without some tinkering or retrocommissioning or something. Are you finding that these systems work, that contractors are getting used to them so that they do work more reliably and I guess I’ll ask you about maintenance after that.

Jesse:                                 03:48                   Yeah, I think this is a, this is the big challenge is that the boxes are easy to buy even though you always have to do some sort of pitched battle over buying a good enough box. But these are complicated things that weave their way through buildings that we may or may not be used to doing well. And I think that is one of the areas where we feel like passive house and energy star have done incredible work at getting people to really test the systems and find out where they really working or not. There’s a lot of sort of faith-based construction in our industry where you know, the game is to cover things up as fast as they can and move on to the next building. It’s not to test to see if it’s working and to really see it. Most people are just trying to get onto the next one. 5So that’s just an industry endemic across the board. And then you combine it with a kind of system that maybe folks aren’t quite as used to doing well. And then you have all these weird things, you know, exhaustingly systems aside, like we, you talked to folks in, you’re starting to talk about a building and you’re talking to, maybe it’s a mechanical engineer you haven’t worked with. Maybe it’s a contractor and it’s okay, we’re gonna put the air in the middle of the living room and then we need a heating coil to heat the air up cause it’s gonna be cold coming in from outside. So we have to buy a heating coil and then we have to pay attention to where we put it. And then we’re going to dump it all in the living room and extract from the kitchen to save money.

Jesse:                                 05:16                   And so even then you get these systems that frankly probably don’t work very well. And then you get someone who complains about it and then the owner says, boy, I don’t know why we did that. Let’s stop doing that. Let’s go back to the bath fan way. At least we didn’t get complaints there.

Robb:                                05:28                   And what a big premium, what a big cost premium. Installed costs of an ERV or HRV versus a bath fan.

Jesse:                                 05:35                   So yeah, that’s where I appreciate where the passive house folks got much more rigorous where they said, no, we will make sure there is fresh air into bedrooms. Like when the teenagers in there with their doors shut, they’re still getting fresh air. We’re not gonna put fresh air in the living room and pretend that magically somehow works its way into the bedroom where the person’s in there have their door shut. Like, no, we’re going to put fresh air where people sleep. And you’re just going to do that. You’re not going to cheap out and you’re going to do such a good heat recovery box that you don’t have to add a bunch of electric coils all through the buildings and add a bunch of costs. You know, you don’t need to do that kind of thinking. We’re going to both make sure it really works and make it simpler. So those have been refreshing and they definitely take some pushing though. But there’s also this bizarre thing where I think multifamily buildings have these systems that never worked, but are code legal, I think the bath fan exhaust system, it kept buildings from rotting out. It kept moisture out of bathrooms, but by no means got fresh air to where people were. And so there’s a funny thing where I think we have a code that prevents people from rotting out building but doesn’t make people healthier. And there’s a whole code path that’s very inexpensive to do. It’s legal, but it doesn’t work.

Robb:                                06:51                   So yeah. And oh my god, there’s a huge debate about that everywhere, even within our office. I mean, there are people in our office that are pushing strongly for, for mandating unbalanced ventilation in multifamily buildings. Balance doesn’t necessarily mean heat recovery, but once you go to balanced, might as well push on to energy recovery. But personally, my biggest hangup is that I agree that exhaust only ventilation has some big potential problems. Some big potential question marks. It’s better than no ventilation, often, maybe even usually, but there’s no rigor in guaranteeing that fresh air gets to occupants.

Jesse:                                 07:45                   Yeah that funny thing where it’s like, we will build it just tight enough that code says we don’t have to have balanced ventilation. And so we’l leave just enough holes. I mean, no one is putting the holes where the people are first of all. And you know, there’s no pretending that it works. And there’s funny thing where, you know, the passive house folks have this reputation for crazy air sealing. And when I go around every American city, I see peel and stick membranes on every building. I see, you know, Blue Skin and Carlisle products on everywhere. So people are building incredibly tight buildings everywhere.

Robb:                                08:26                   Way more. Yeah. Way more.

Jesse:                                 08:29                   Just the building products are so different than what you were doing 20 years ago. So that to me is a little wacky where we’re, we’re still pretending that those buildings are not airtight. When I’m looking at those products saying they’re an inch away from being a passive house, they just haven’t thought it through and the air’s coming from The parking garage and the elevator shaft.

Robb:                                08:47                   I totally agree. Exhaust only doesn’t work.

Jesse:                                 08:53                   Totally. It doesn’t work to make people happy. It keeps the buildings from rotting. I think it’s successful at that part.

Robb:                                08:59                   But are you finding that your ERVs or HRVs are working? Are they installed, Commissioned? That’s hangup cause I see bad installations so often. And then lack of maintenance. These systems require more maintenance than exhaust only.

Jesse:                                 09:17                   Well that’s the hard thing is, we’re in one of those step changes where we’re making our buildings perform a lot better and they’re getting more complicated at the same time. And we’ve done this before, like we do these moments when you go from a two by four wall to an engineered system or we start rain screening or all the other things that we’ve done in buildings that make them work better, but sure they’re more complicated and it’s, yeah, it’s hard. You do have to put a bunch of effort effort in when you’re at that transition point and you have to figure out what to push on. And that’s kind of grinding work, you know, making sure someone made their fresh air system work, like that’s not very glamorous.

Robb:                                10:02                   But you’re finding you’re finding that are succeeding?

Jesse:                                 10:07                   After people put a lot of effort into them. Our very first passive house building we couldn’t get certified for I think it took, it took a while because one kitchen exhaust louver, the duct wasn’t connected to the grill and it just took so long to hunt it down. Like it took multiple testing. It took a person getting access to an apartment to go look into realize that, Oh, that thing isn’t connected to that thing. And we didn’t get certified for quite a long time because of one kitchen in a 45 unit building. But, you know, if the client hadn’t tried to be passive house, it never would have gotten found. Right. No one ever would’ve fixed that kitchen. Yep.

Robb:                                10:47                   Yeah. No ventilation from that kitchen at all. Right.

Jesse:                                 10:50                   So yeah, it was incredibly hard to get it there, but we got it there and that took rigor.

Robb:                                10:57                   Yeah. And that’s something that I’ve been involved in. Just measuring the performance of systems when they’re installed, and especially new systems especially, you know, especially if it’s new to the contractor or new to the builder and the developer, there’s a learning curve with all of it for everybody.

Jesse:                                 11:17                   The building industry is a really strange industry where our quality control standards, compared to the automotive industry, or any product industry where they make thousands of the same thing, they have quality control that is rigorous, that checks everything, you know, and that has a way of chasing out flaws. And here we are in this weird business where every single one we do is different. Every building’s a prototype. You know, and we don’t have rigorous quality control standards quite frankly.

Robb:                                11:48                   So for you, are you and your projects are getting to a point where every Building is not a prototype, that there’s enough, I don’t want to say standardization, but similar systems that it’s getting easier?

Jesse:                                 12:05                   You’re getting back to the talk you saw about the stealth passive house and that’s what we were really talking about is that, so here we are, we’re architects. We aren’t building scientists, we aren’t researchers. We aren’t on that field. We’re trying to design beautiful buildings that our clients love. And then we got into this, trying to make better buildings technically, and I would say yes on the multifamily buildings. We tried out a bunch of things four or five years ago and we’ve settled into for buildings of a certain scale, a thing that kind of works. And it has quieted down where we’re starting to draw the same wall every time. We’re starting to think the ventilation systems are probably pretty similar, and it’s allowed us to focus on architecture a little bit more again, because we maybe are a little bit over that technical hump where we can, yeah, it is funny. We can look at a building if it’s in the two to four stories tall, wood frame, four to five stories tall on in the Northeast like Oh we can make that, we can get that to passive house. Throw a six, eight, 10 story building at us and we’ll be pretty lost. We arent big city architects. But if you’re in wood frame five stories max, Yeah, I could probably rattle off the five things we need to do to make a building a passive house.

Robb:                                13:27                   Could you rattle off the five things you need to do to make your building a passive house? Y

Jesse:                                 13:32                   Right. There’s a test, you know, in the Northeast we build out of wood, we are probably a two by six wall with exterior installation. That’s about two to three inches thick. There is probably a roof that’s about, you know, r40 to 50. We are stringently air sealed. We have a heat recovery ventilation system that is either on the roof or at the end of the hallways that’s doing a block of 10 to 15 apartments in one unit and it’s got at least 80% heat recovery on it. Triple glazed windows. Probably if we’re in affordable housing, it’s fiberglass or vinyl. If it’s in a nicer building, you know, it’s just, it’s a nicer triple glazed window. I would say that right there gets us 85-90% of the way. You know, if you’re in a peculiar orientation where you’re all facing West and we’re starting to look really carefully at air conditioning issues, that one is really a tricky one.

Robb:                                14:36                   Yeah, I was going to ask you about heating and cooling. Is there a standard for that, for this kind of building typology?

Jesse:                                 14:44                   Well, if you’re doing a really, really good building, I think one of the things that’s been so funny for us is you know, these intricate technical programs like passive house are hard to kind of get your arms around. And one of the ways I think that was really, really effective for us was I, I went back to kind of some of the first stuff I ever learned and they said, Oh, passive house, it’s a heating load of one watt per square foot. And that kinda stuck for me. I was like, okay, wait. All right, I get this. Like a bedroom is a 10 by 10 in affordable housing, a hundred square feet. So a hundred watt light bulb, heats a bedroom on the worst day of the year. Okay. I can get my head around that. Like, yeah, you’ve got a 600 square foot apartment and you need 600 Watts of heat. Yeah, okay. That’s like that little portable heater they use on construction sites. or you might use in your attic like, Oh 600 watt heater. Like that’s the heating system for that apartment. And that was kind of this radical thing of what’s the thing that can keep an apartment warm? And that gets you down to this funny realization that you can do it with electric resistance. You know, electric baseboard like they did in the Pacific Northwest works pretty awesome in a passive house and it’s super simple. And how’s the thermostat? But you know, it doesn’t air condition your building, but that’s the territory you’re in. It’s just this crazy jump down. But that was funny for me was having this thing stuck in my head of, Oh, it should be about one watt per square foot. Like I can talk to a mechanical engineer about it and I’m not a mechanical engineer, I’m just an architect.

Jesse:                                 16:18                   But I can like ask them, are we close to that? And they, they should be able to give me that number. You know, that sort of plain talk has been part of it of like, Oh, these buildings should be one watt per square foot, which is radically tiny. I mean it just this minuscule amount of heat.

Robb:                                16:41                   Yeah. It’s a big game changer. It really, it really is.

Jesse:                                 16:44                   It’s just so tiny. It’s hard to wrap your head around it.

Robb:                                16:47                   I agree. Yeah. And we’ve seen, you know, we’ve had success with really very efficient, very efficient buildings without needing to distribute heat, you know, a point source heater and a central space. You know, you turn on the light and a bedroom and the gains from a person being in the bedroom heats the bedroom. It’s a game changer.

Jesse:                                 17:07                   And so that takes you to air conditioning. So if you can heat a building with a hundred watt light bulb, boy, it must not be that hard to overheat. Is it? Huh? Like point that window towards the sunset on August and yeah, you could probably get kind of hot in there. Even in Maine or Northern Vermont, right? Yeah. So even in Maine, you must be seeing more need for air conditioning in passive house. Yeah, and I guess of course it’s not just passive house. Everybody’s got air conditioners now. All my neighbors have air conditioners even in Maine now, and they didn’t in the 70s. So that’s just changed across the board where people’s expectations are different, I think than they used to be. But in apartment buildings in Maine with the worry that summers are going to get even hotter coming up. Yeah. I think we need to be planning for air conditioning in every apartment building.

Robb:                                18:01                   And are you? Even affordable housing where that has not been standard? Are they coming to a realization that maybe they need to?

Jesse:                                 18:10                   They very much want to. There are pretty severe budget limits in our state that are, we’re still going without. But I think if you talked to any affordable housing developer in Northern New England and asked them, on your new buildings, are you running into overheating? And they will probably nod and say, yeah, we’ve had some real struggles like high humidity. I mean are you seeing it? This isn’t the passive house thing. This is just a new building thing in Northern new England. People are getting over heating in their apartment buildings.

Robb:                                18:47                   And so are you going to heat pumps? I’ve even seen some projects with window air conditioners, that are borderline passive house.

Jesse:                                 19:00                   I mean, we’re definitely trying to do heat humps because they’re so much better. They use so much less electricity than electric resistance. We are a pretty frugal state. I mean people are being asked to build buildings in the $160 to $170 a square foot range for affordable housing. And today that’s pretty, pretty tough to build anything for that cost in our area. But it’s the best the target the state agencies are asking people to work for. So there are just these huge budget challenges in 2019 building anything. But so that aside we have heat pumps and then we’ve got these engineers we work with who are pushing us really, really hard to go back to hydronics and to go back to hot and cold water loops instead of heat pumps, which is kind of interesting.

Jesse:                                 19:50                   well, what are their reasons?

Jesse:                                 19:54                   Their reasons are interesting. One of their main reasons is they say, so the refrigerant, whatever we’re using now, and I don’t know what refrigerant we use now, they say we’ve been through like three refrigerant changes in the last 30 years and we’re probably got another one. So owner, you’re going to put a thing in your building where all the stuff that makes it work is going to be obsolete and probably illegal in another 10 years. So there’s a little bit of a planned obsolescence. They are also pushing us that they are saying, you know, these heat pumps might only be a 20 year life span. That they just aren’t expected to last very long as pieces of machinery. And when you have a 40 unit building and you’ve got a whole lot of these machines that can get pretty complicated and it’s hard to downsize them far enough still and refrigerant leakage, they, I mean, they sort of rattle off these reasons. And they’re pushing us to go back to the sort of very simple fan coil systems of a hot water loop and a Coldwater loop because they’re saying, okay, so you changed the box on the outside of the building, but you only change one of them and it, if it fails in 20 years, you put a new magic super efficient thing that didn’t exist when you design the building. But it’s still water running through the building. It’s still, it’s like it’s future proof is what they say. So that’s been kind of interesting push.

Robb:                                21:09                   We’re seeing that too. And there’s no silver bullet. I mean he pumps can work great. I have tested many. I’ve tested many that have not, I’ve tested many that have worked great. The durability, the long term viability, the refrigerant phase out, the refrigerant leakage. Those are all big question marks that I don’t know that anybody has a perfect answer to. But yeah, as far as, I mean, as far as first cost for heating and cooling, with a single system, it seems in buildings with very modest loads, it seems like, it seems like that would be appealing. Is, is that accurate for your clients?

Jesse:                                 21:54                   Yeah, the clients I think are pretty happy to have someone who seems to know what they’re doing pushing for something. And I think they do have, most people have hot water baseboard buildings that seem to work pretty well. They may not love the costs they get them, but they don’t think of them as failing. The buildings they own here in our area. And yes, a lot of clients want to not be using fossil fuels and they probably, you know, okay, I guess there’s a gas system running that and that’s not great.

Robb:                                22:23                   But For now. You know that that plant might be able to be replaced with a much more efficient, lower carbon emission device.

Jesse:                                 22:38                   Yeah. Easier than retrofitting a 40 unit building and ripping out all the heat pumps.

Robb:                                22:41                   This is true. This is true. It’s, it’s not crazy.

Jesse:                                 22:45                   So yeah, we’ve, we’ve got a building right now that’s a 65 unit building and we are looking at electric resistance heat and a cooling loop that runs through the whole building. And it, it’s only gonna air condition in the living room, living spaces. It’s not going to air condition the bedrooms. That’s how we’re going to keep costs down. And we’re gonna have one little tiny fan coil and the living room of every apartment. So it’s affordable housing. And so, you know, your living room will be nice and cool and if it’s a really hot night, you’re going to keep your bedroom doors open, turn on a fan. And I think, you know, we’re looking at, it seems to be like, ah, it’s like 320 it’s like $5,000 a unit to get this system into the whole building. And it’s definitely cheaper than a VRF fancy computer controlled commercial heat pump system.

Robb:                                23:34                   Yup. Yeah. And so there’s a central chiller, is there?

Jesse:                                 23:38                   A central chiller. Yup

Robb:                                23:39                   Okay. So, yeah, totally viable. It’s frustrating to have loads that are so small and still still struggle to find really simple.

Jesse:                                 23:49                   And the other thing our engineers love is like when you only need a tiny, tiny bit of heating and cooling, a water system can deliver a tiny little bit of heating and cooling. Infinitely small. I can just keep going and they’re persuasive folks and you know, okay. We’ll try it. But yeah, I mean it is. Yeah, you’re right. Cause it is this funny thing where you end up in these bizarre little rabbit hole conversations. The great thing is, is that we’re just seeing that the, if you can pull off these passive house buildings, they’re just so incredibly economical to run. Yeah. The first one we did that we have measured numbers and it’s like $60 per apartment per month, heating, cooling, hot water, and absolutely everything. All electric bills, like every single bit of energy, $60 a month to run an apartment. That’s, that’s amazing. Very happy clients. And they also say that the costs are much closer to the modeled expectation than all the LEED buildings and all of the other like performance programs they try, they’re saying it, you know, these passive house buildings are running closer to what the, the fancy design teams told them it might be than any other system. Much less variance, which I think is interesting. It gets back to that testing, you know that like, it’s about the only program that forces you to test the damn building and find out if it worked or not. And then if it triggers Energy Star, so you have to do all the energy star or the energy star stuff is the great stuff.

Robb:                                25:28                   So the energy star for homes, with the kind of the quality control throughout the construction design and construction process.

Jesse:                                 25:36                   Yeah. Somebody like looking at the installation, looking at the building and staring at every wall. That’s, that’s the great testing. That’s where owners get hit. There’s so much money out of that. So much value out of that for the money they spend.

Robb:                                25:48                   And they appreciate that?

Jesse:                                 25:49                   I hope so. It sure is about the biggest bang for the buck they’re getting.

Robb:                                26:00                   Did the owners see that or are they kind of a little bit divorced from that whole process where, you know, insulators are being called out or air sealers are being called out about something.

Jesse:                                 26:12                   I mean, they’re definitely getting these memos that are usually saying like, Hey, somebody didn’t do something right and we caught it. You gotta appreciate that.

Robb:                                26:23                   We do a lot of ratings and some people are only in it for the incentive. Others utility incentives. So I have to hire a rater. Ugh. It’s like, you know, they’re not happy. But then we have some clients repeat clients who, who really do see the value in, you know, that layer of quality control that they’re not, they wouldn’t be getting otherwise. I mean, code building inspectors, they don’t, they can’t get into that level of detail. The code doesn’t get into that level of detail.

Jesse:                                 26:58                   Yeah, it’s really interesting. And yeah, it’s been a funny journey over the last years, but we are definitely to the point where we’re starting to work on a lot of buildings all over. So we managed to have success early on in Maine with sort of a passive house building that was a decent scale. And now we’ve got calls from New Hampshire and Connecticut and Massachusetts and Maine and we’re doing projects all over and a lot of it is being driven by affordable housing and state agencies saying you know, we will score projects well in our competitive rounds that try that pledge to make a passive house. And so we’ve got folks calling us. So it’s pretty great because it’s seeing a lot of better buildings getting built really quickly.

Robb:                                27:46                   Excellent. So is really most of your business high performance if not certified or going in that direction?

Jesse:                                 27:56                   Yeaah, yeah, it is. Absolutely. I think our business is I would say it’s half single family homes, new in renovation. And another chunk of multifamily. The multifamily is not the biggest thing we do. I’d really say it’s, it’s homes for people is the biggest thing we do. We also do a bunch of restaurant work and high performance restaurant work is, that’s a weird one. Yeah. So everything we’re doing is high performance.We have pledged to the AIA’s climate change goals and we’ve signed on that this idea that everything we do will be carbon neutral by 2030, which is a little scary cause that’s only 11 years away. But yeah, I think we know what looking at, we actually measure every project we do and we check it against the targets. And last year I think we had like on average 70% reduction over sort of the American baseline on projects across the board. We’re definitely getting some kind of amazing successes I think by this focus.

Robb:                                29:02                   That’s a pretty cool statistic right there. That’s awesome.

Jesse:                                 29:06                   And you know, admittedly we don’t tackle the super hard things like college laboratories, you know, or hospitals, things that are crazily energy intensive. But We’ve definitely figured some things out. I think it feels like, and trying to spread the word.

Robb:                                29:24                   Absolutely. And your single family clients, did they come to you because they want high performance?

Jesse:                                 29:33                   Well, it’s definitely something that we tell people we do. And I mean our tagline is beautiful, sustainable, attainable. So I’m sure we are definitely attracting folks who are looking for it. But yeah, I think to us, every house we do should be able to be net zero. If it isn’t, we must be doing something wrong. And honestly, the single family houses, I guess we were talking to a minute ago, multifamily is still in this really huge learning curve moment It feels like where a lot of people are trying a lot of things. And I hope in 10 years we look back and it’ll be a solved problem. To us, the single family is kind of looking like a bit of a solved problem. Like it’s not particularly hard to make a net zero home, a heat pump water heater, some air source heat pumps, make the walls r30 to r40 and air seal it well and you’ve probably got a net zero home. Like, you know, it’s nuts. Net Zero energy just isn’t very hard with single family homes. Solving the transportation, you know, there’s plenty of other hard things about it, but that, that part should be pretty easy.

Robb:                                30:42                   Yeah, yeah. I agree. Single-family new construction is one of the easiest things to do, yeah.

Jesse:                                 30:49                   But 15 years ago it wasn’t, I mean it was a complete like head-scratcher. But in 2019, yeah, it’s like, you know, when I, when I’m out in the world talking or something and someone starts asking about like, well, what wall assembly are you using? And it’s like, look, it’s 2019, if you can’t Google five high performance wall systems, you’re not trying. Like you don’t need me to tell you what wall to do here. Just Google it.

Robb:                                31:15                   That’s cool to hear that, that we’ve gotten there. I mean I dont hear that enough, but I agree it’s becoming more and more understood. Well understood more and more. You know, you look at, you look at details, you look at sections, you see their ceiling. I mean that’s part of sets now. I mean that’s, people know that they have to pay attention to that stuff.

Jesse:                                 31:47                   Go do what building science Corp says to do. Okay. Oh, you don’t want to use foam? Okay. Go do what the other people say to do. Okay.Yeah, there’s lots of resources out there in single-family world, but the multifamily is complicated. You have lots of different users with crazily different needs. You have urban sites, you have bigger scale. You’ve got different machinery. And yeah, and a really tough cost environment so it’s, yeah, it’s not quite a solved problem yet, but it feels like we’re getting closer.

Robb:                                32:16                   Yeah. You feel like you guys have your own method for a specific building type a, but industry wide you’re not seeing that become standardized?

Jesse:                                 32:27                   No, I don’t think so. And I guess that’s why the stealth passive house talk, I felt like we were really trying to push people on a couple key things that were really eye opening for us. And one was that we’ve really been working hard to reverse this idea that passive house is about really thick insulation. And that’s why we’re so focused on really get the ventilation right and then work on the air ceiling. And honestly, you’ve probably done 70% of the heavy lifting at that point. And when we we’re doing these energy models and we first saw it and we were sort of turning all these dials, it was kind of this amazing thing that it was like the installation wasn’t doing the work. And I was like, I couldn’t really get it at first. And then I was sitting with a mechanical engineer. I said, okay, wait, so you’ve got like 50 cubic feet per minute in an apartment is like the ventilation rate. So you’ve got 50 cubic feet coming in, 50 cubic feet coming out, you’ve got a 40 unit building. Like okay, yeah, so you have 2000 cubic feet of air moving 24 hours a day, 100% of the time. I was like, that sounds like a lot of air. They’re like, yeah, that’s a lot of air. Like this is a tornado blowing through the building 24 hours a day, and then we first did these building, we stood next to the machine that was moving air. It’s like, wow, that machine is working really hard. Like you’re right. There was a lot of air moving through this building. It was like, and then it was this idea that apartment buildings have a lot of people living in close proximity and there’s a lot of air moving through there to keep the building fresh and healthy and there’s a wind blowing through the building. So if you have a really good heat recovery box, you are absolutely doing the right thing. Just cause the quantity of air moving. You know, that’s the biggest driving force and that’s why you have to have really, really good heat recovery stuff.

Robb:                                34:17                   Yeah Infiltration and ventilation. Certainly the biggest, the biggest pieces.

Jesse:                                 34:22                   And after that, you know, make sure you don’t do them. Things like connects steel from the inside to the outside. Make sure you’re totally thermally broken with at least, you know, r10 to r15 to r20 and you’re probably getting there. And the other funny thing that we realized is that every project team is just used to fighting over insulation. I guess just this classic thing you do, like you designed the building, it’s over budget. You take all the insulation off the building, and it’s this ritual dance where like the contractor knows that you do that first and everybody’s used to it. And so we were kind of realizing that you can’t do that with air sealing. You can’t look at the owner and say we need to air seal it a lot less. We’re going to save you money because you know, if you look at them and you say, well, okay, so how much money and how much less better are you gonna make it? Or if they say like, Oh, all that air, something’s going to cost a lot of shit. Well what do I get for free? They don’t always have a good answer about what they get for free because most people can’t quantify it. So you get this very different cost reduction question when if someone says like, Oh, that passive house air ceiling is really expensive. It’s like, okay, well then give us only half passive house.

Robb:                                35:46                   What is that Jessie?

Jesse:                                 35:48                   Exactly they don’t know either. So it’s been a different thing where everybody knows how to take triple glazed windows out of a project. Everyone knows how to take half the insulation off a building. Yeah. It’s like everybody’s good at that. So when you can do these buildings that have code levels of insulation, there’s nothing left to take.

Robb:                                36:06                   Right, right. Yeah. And I’ve seen it, you know, code levels of insulation with the rigorous air sealing and the excellent ventilation get you to passive house levels.

Jesse:                                 36:17                   Yeah. Especially the bigger the building gets, right? The bigger the building, the more the forces are going in that direction. So yeah, it’s been really interesting for us. It’s been taking the focus off and that’s what I had been going, you know, if I’m talking to folks about one thing, it’s this, it’s like your, your ventilation equipment that your engineers doing is probably nowhere near good enough.

Jesse:                                 36:35                   Like you really need really good stuff so that the folks aren’t freezing in their bedrooms. Again, someone explained to me, So if you buy a 50% effective ventilation unit and it’s zero out and 70 inside, the air coming into your bedroom is 35 degrees. That’s pretty cold. Like I don’t want to be 50% of the way to zero, but if you’re 85% efficient, you know, that air coming in the bedroom is at 60, Oh 60 that sounds a lot better. And those kinds of levers are things that are really worth working on that if you, cause if you stop at 50 and you do that standard stuff, you don’t get the benefits.

Jesse:                                 37:16                   Yeah. That’s good. You’ve learned, you’ve learned the buttons to push a little bit too.

Jesse:                                 37:24                   Yeah. I mean, you know, half of it is these funny little like tidbits you just put in a meetings. I do think the big thing that’s going to change is when people start asking for great ventilation systems in their apartments. So when condo buyers start asking about like, Oh, so what kind of ventilation system does this apartment have? You know, that’s when the market turns inside condominiums when people really start asking. And I think it’s when people become really attuned about asthma and urban environments with their kids. And you know, that’s, that sort of health consciousness is what’s gonna really change. Another piece of construction in America is when homeowners and you know, that’s what I really would tell to every homeowner who’s even thinking about buying a house or a condo. Like, Oh, what’s going to get me fresh air in the bedrooms when my kids are sleeping? And is it going to be filtered?

Robb:                                38:19                   I’m not arguing that that would be a really a change. But are you, are you even starting to see that? I’m not sure that we see that in any scale.

Jesse:                                 38:30                   I don’t think we’re there yet, but I think it’s coming pretty soon because we had a building recently. And it was a condominium project. So the realtor was in the building and you know, the team was really struggling. They were like, why do you keep saying we need to have this ventilation system. They really looked at us and they said, no one else in town is doing this. Why do you say we have to do this? And you say things like, cause it will work and the other thing they’re doing doesn’t work. And they really didn’t like that answer cause they were selling the other thing. And finally the realtor did say, she’s like, you know, a lot of these buyers are really health conscious. She’s like, I think I can sell that. I can tell people that there’s a feature that you have fresh filtered air in all the rooms of your apartment. And I think people will buy this over the other thing.

Robb:                                39:15                   So she like came around just in one, in one kind of meeting with you.

Jesse:                                 39:21                   Oh no it wasnt one, it was like 6. Six of us trying every single trick we had to try to convince them to do it, but it was, that was the one where she finally said like, yeah, that I can do. That we’ll get that will bring people around. Cause she just had two young kids and she was thinking about it, but she was thinking about her own house all of a sudden. So yeah. But it is person by person. Yes. A giant marketing campaign would be wonderful by the American Fresh Air Society or someone.

Robb:                                39:45                   That’ll be a big step. SoI usually wrap up with like asking, you know, what are we going to see five years down the road? But you already started us on this line of conversation. Do you think that, you know, that we’re going to see more high performance as far as efficiency, as far as sustainability, as far as carbon emissions being driven by health concerns on the residential side?

Jesse:                                 40:15                   I don’t know, cause I’m no sort of trend master or anything like that. I do know that all the health stuff sweeps through everybody, you know, like gluten free sweeps through the country. You know, these things do catch fire. I think the work in the affordable housing community and the take up of passive house is really amazing and it’s, it seems to be happening really quickly, where, yeah, it’s changing an industry really fast and I think we’ll get some really good buildings coming out of the next 5 to 10 years in that sector. And then I think other building owners, I think university dormitories are happening pretty quickly. They’re jumping on it as well. Yup. People who own buildings a long time are hearing that there’s a thing out there that seems to be working pretty well. So that group of folks I think is catching on pretty quick. Cool. Yeah. Cool.

Robb:                                41:15                   Thank you Jesse. Thanks very much. If you want to hear more from Jesse on this and you can make it to Portland, Maine later in October, Jesse’s going to be talking about the IAQ and energy conference on October 31, Halloween 2019 I’ve been to that conference a several times and it’s a really, really good conference. I will probably be there. There’s a link on our website or you can go to IAQ and energy.com everything spelled out, a N D spelled out. Also, if there are any multifamily ventilation geeks listening, there’s a proposed amendment to ASHRAE standards 62.2 that’s the standard that deals with residential ventilation and this amendment would limit where exhaust only ventilation could be used in multifamily buildings. The idea is this would get more fresh air getting to dwelling spaces more consistently. That amendment is open for comment until October 21st I believe 2019 we’ll put a link on our website or you can find more details on ashrae.org thanks.

Speaker 4:                        42:31                   Thank you for listening to buildings and beyond. For more information about the topics discussed today. Visit www dot [inaudible] dot com slash podcast and check out the episode show notes. Buildings and beyond is brought to you by Steven winter associates. We provide energy, green building and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment our professionals have led the way since 1972 and the development of best practices to achieve high performance buildings. Our production team for today’s episode includes Dylan Martello, Alex [inaudible], and myself. Heather Breslin, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Kristof Irwin, PE, M. Eng.

Kristof Irwin, P.E., M Eng., is the visionary principal of Positive Energy. Kristof’s background includes 12 years of experience as a custom builder (including deep energy retrofits and zero-net energy projects) and 11 years as a building science consultant. He worked for 14 years as an engineer, research scientist, and physicist for government and university research labs. He is active in the local and national high-performance building community including his role as the Chair of AIA Austin’s Building Enclosure Committee, several ASHRAE committees – ASHRAE TC-2.1 (Physiology & Human Environment), ASHRAE SSPC-55 (Thermal comfort), ASHRAE SSPC-62.2 (Ventilation/IAQ), and the RESNET ANSI Standards Development Committee (SDC).

When all is said and done, buildings are intended for people. So, why do some buildings lack the components critical to human health and happiness? This podcast explores the human-centered approach to designing buildings, focusing on the value preference systems that guide our everyday decisions.

To help us better understand this often neglected topic, we invited a special guest from the Building Science Podcast, Kristof Irwin. From his experience as an engineer, research scientist, and physicist, Kristof describes the human psychology behind decision making and the physiological impacts associated with the built environment.

Be sure to check out Kristof and The Building Science Podcast!

Send your feedback and questions to [email protected]

Buildings and Beyond is the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Buildings and Beyond is a production of Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building, and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. For more information, visit swinter.com.

Hosts: Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby

Production Team: Heather Breslin | Alex Mirabile | Dylan Martello

Kelly: (00:06)
Welcome to buildings and beyond.

Robb: (00:09)
the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment.

Kelly: (00:13)
by focusing on efficiency, accessibility and health.

Robb: (00:18)
I’m Robb Aldrich.

Kelly: (00:19)
and I’m Kelly Westby. Kristof is the principle of positive energy in Austin. Their mission is to transform the way conditioned space is delivered to society. They offer residential outcome focused design engineering services for robust mechanical systems as well as off-grid power and water systems. Kristof was also the chair of AIA Austin’s building enclosure committee. He has been involved in several ASHRAE committees including physiology and human environment, thermal comfort, ventilation and IAQ as well as RESNET standards development committee. I first learned about Kristof through the building science podcast which he hosts. We wanted to bring him on our show because of his focus on human centered design. We discussed two main topics in the episode, human psychology related to decision making and the impact of damp indoor environments on human physiology. If you are considering skipping this, because I’m” an engineer and I’m not interested in psychology, I know everything I need to know about mold,” Stop right there. This episode is particularly for you. But first a quick aside, my cohost Rob wants you all to join him at the 2019 us symposium series for a deep dive into issues and opportunities around electrification in the Northeast. The symposium is brought to you by the Northeast energy efficiency partnerships, the Northeast States for coordinated air use management and the electric power research Institute. Pathways to de-carbonization in the Northeast will be held August 27th to 29th at the Marriott Brooklyn bridge in Brooklyn, New York. The event will convene leaders from government, industry, community and advocacy to address opportunities, trends, and challenges of minimizing the carbon footprint for homes, buildings, and transportation in the Northeast. U S check out the link in our show notes for more details. Now let’s get back to hot and humid buildings and humans in Austin, Texas.

Kelly: (02:15)
So welcome Kristof to the buildings and beyond podcast.

Kristof: (02:19)
Thank you.

Kelly: (02:19)
And thanks for agreeing to meet me here in this WeWork in beautiful Barton Springs in Austin.

Kristof: (02:26)
My pleasure.

Kelly: (02:27)
And today we wanted to talk a little bit, I’ll give a little, give a little background about you in the intro, but we’re going to kind of dive into the, I think what people call the softer sides of engineering and building science, which is the psychology and physiology kind of parts of humans. I know you talk a lot about this. So maybe just give us a little background. How did you start to become interested in human physiology and how it relates to building science and where do you see the industry needs to maybe make a pivot around, around that?

Kristof: (03:06)
Great. So I’m a problem solver as we all are. I think in the back, at least the back of our minds. And I recognize that we’re putting a lot of energy and resources into buildings. And coming out of a background at several national labs, I was a research scientist where we put a lot of inputs in to get the output that we want, right? So I started to think about, well, what’s the output of a home or an apartment? And it’s actually you and it’s actually me. It’s a healthy, productive member of society. That’s what these inputs we put in- electricity and freshwater and data today and gas and the other inputs and then the outputs are the black water and gray water, things like that. But really the fundamental output is you, the content of your mind and the key in the fact that you’re in a healthy body. And so that’s how I got into it.

Kelly: (04:06)
Yeah. Reframing basically, we’re not building buildings for the sake of the building, but for housing our individuals. That’s really interesting. I was just at a house warming the other day, which was the opening of a multifamily building. And someone said something along the lines of, if we’re not focusing on the humans that are interacting with the building and living in the building, then what are we doing?

Kristof: (04:35)
Yeah. It’s all sort of ego trips otherwise.

Kelly: (04:38)
Yeah. Right. Can I make the biggest or the smartest or whatever building. Yeah.

Kristof: (04:44)
Really, did you build the building to take pictures of it and get it on house? Is that really what it was?

Kelly: (04:51)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And so talk to me a little bit about, we sort of chatted a little bit in the beginning, but about the invisible and how we as a society, but also in our industry aren’t paying attention to the invisible and what we, what we can’t see can hurt us I guess is sort of your messaging although I’m paraphrased a little bit there, but what do you see as some of the key things like top key things that you wish people knew about or thought about that are invisible?

Kristof: (05:27)
So three come to mind and two are maybe what most people think of when you talk about invisible. And the third is maybe a little more subtle. the first two would be invisible in the sense that what we call vision are these eyeball things that we have on our head. And that picks up a narrow range of frequencies and a certain range of sizes, right? So if it’s out of that size and frequency range, we call it invisible. So things like thermal bridges are actually invisible. But we’ve learned as an industry through something I jokingly call the head Gemini of enclosure realism. And I, I know you’re sort of on the enclosure side, but we over the last, let’s say 10 years in our industry have really upped our game and understanding enclosures. Meanwhile, indoor air quality is invisible. Thermal comfort is invisible, right? And then, so those were the two, by the way, two of the three. I wasn’t going to talk about thermal bridging, but first of all, we talk about what our eyes can pick up and not just that, but it’s, it’s what our eyes pick up and that data gets fed into a subjective neural network that then responds with opinions about what our eyes picked up. And that is really where the focus of our industry is. So I’m already doing a little sprawl, so I’m gonna just make it clear. The three things I think are invisible are human psychology and that is the absolutely primary input in the building world that is not being paid attention to. And that is the dominant impact. But then the other two are, we are living in the chemical age, we are immersed in chemicals all day long. I mean this little room we’re in is easily a hundred pounds of air, which is compressible fluid. But we are like fish in a little fishbowl and you know, depending on what I put on me this morning and what’s coming off of the kombucha, I have here, and the vinyl table, and the flame retardant in the cushion in the chair. Right. So we are soaked in, immersed in indoor chemicals all day. And by the way, you could wear a scuba tank with me right now and they can go transdermal up to take is real. You can get these chemicals in your blood without breathing.

Kelly: (07:32)
Right. Okay. Transdermal meaning through the skin.

Kristof: (07:35)
Yeah. Right. Like a nicotine patch. And then we could talk about, there’s data behind that. I mean it’s like there’s a research study behind that. And then, and then the indoor microbiome, right? The microbiota, the biotoxins, there’s all kinds of ways to refer to this, but the myriad living beings that affect us. So those would be the three psychology, chemical pollutants and microbiomes.

Kelly: (08:00)
Okay. I like it. And to dive in a little bit more on human psychology, I think we maybe have been talking more about it now and I don’t know if you guys are familiar with the WELL standard, of course you are, or how much uptake it’s had in, in Austin. I know, you know, it’s still sort of small and growing, but talking more about how we feel in a space a little bit more than what we maybe have done before. And that’s been really interesting to me. And I was saying I dabble in the envelope, but my heart is in the mechanical side. Although I liked the whole building altogether. And I always thought, you know, the aesthetics piece is not that important and we need to like get a good enclosure and we need ventilate right. And maybe part of my transition is buying my own house and worrying about what it looks like. But I think also just realizing how people feel in a space is so relevant to how they’re going to experience the space and how that person is going to be productive later on. So it’s interesting that you mentioned psychology. I’m wondering what your thinking when you say human psychology, what aspects are you thinking about?

Kristof: (09:28)
Well It’s a great question. Fundamentally we have sensors on our bodies and we take in data and then that leads to actions and decisions. And so in between is what I call human psychology. And I know there’s probably a formal crunchy definition, but what I guess what I’m referring to is the somewhat invisible even to ourselves, value preference systems that we use to guide our decisions. And one of them that is really strikingly powerful in our industry are the opinions and the preferences and the kind of background history of owners and developers. I’m reading an awesome book right now called the right use of power. I recommended for anyone, it’s not building science related at all, it’s psychology, but basically where is the power? Like you’re at a project team meeting someone in that project team, typically if the architect or the owner or the developer are there, that’s where the power is, right? But typically they’re not often at the meetings, but the owner interests are either held by an owner’s rep or the architect purports to say, I am speaking on these decisions. So that’s where the power is. And often that power is ill informed. It is, it is biased by eyeballs, by economics and by kinda like egos. Like this is what I do. And that’s a really important one. Let, let’s say I’m a developer and I have been a small developer. I’ve built many homes in Austin. I had the power. And I recognize in hindsight now that I didn’t have the body of knowledge to make good decisions. I assumed everything was fine such that it was reasonable to focus on aesthetics. Right? So at the same time, I lacked this really important character trait that is detrimental to developers in some way. And that’s called humility. And what I mean by that is if I’m a developer, I’ve got a lot of money on the line. This is a risky situation. Similarly, if I’m a builder, if I’m a general contractor, I need to be a motive force and make this happen. And neither one of those is like, gee, I wonder if I should rethink my approach. Gee, is there anything I don’t know, are there unknowns. So these personality types and these character traits that are needed to make these big projects come to fruition are actually not including humility and not including the soft side of, should I rethink things or is there something new?

Kelly: (12:09)
That’s actually incredibly interesting because I’ve been thinking a lot about this from the commissioning side. So I do a lot of commissioning and you are supposed to influence the entire job, but you have no authority whatsoever. You don’t hold any of the contracts. Right. And I lead a team. I think there’s some translation between how I lead or want to lead in within the office internally and how I want to lead kind of externally and with a project team. And so there’s this I think mentality and I don’t know if it’s New York city centric to be honest, but we like to get in a room and just yell. That’s the tactic of command and control if you are also the commander. And really what that produces is a bunch of people running around and agreeing with you in the meeting and then knowing that they’re never going to meet those deadlines or saying yes, yes, yes. And then cutting corners somewhere else so that they can, you know, meet the deadline, meet the fee, whatever. And I see this happen again and again, and I think that just what you said, this shift in, can we rethink the way that we’ve structured this so that we can take into consideration the amazing experience that we have at this table that doesn’t necessarily reside all within that one person who happens to be the loudest or happens to have the power hold the cash.

Kristof: (13:45)
Yeah. Yeah. There’s a beautiful quote. I took some philosophy classes in college and there’s quote that stuck with me is what does he know of London? He who only London knows and excuse the patriarchal reference with the he there. But like what do we really know about our industry? If all we know is our industry locally, right? Like in central Texas, people consider in residential context, certainly duct board and flex air distribution systems is completely normal. It’s like, you know, fast food restaurants are in fact restaurants and that’s all we need to know about. And so there’s this implicit distortion that the hardworking, dedicated human beings that are installing these systems and recommending systems, they don’t even recognize that if, if I go to Seattle or New York or even Washington D C, that metal distribution systems are quite common and that’s normal there.

Kelly: (14:44)
It is interesting and I think a lot of people come into the context of something new and assume that their prior experience will apply until like completely proven otherwise they need to be proven otherwise rather than taking kind of an open approach. And I think you’ve spoken to this on, I’ve heard you speak about you know, the, I’ve been doing this for 30 years. Everyone’s gotten that comment before, independent of the industry. I think everybody wants to say, you know, I’ve been doing this for X years, so just listen to me, whatever. But you talk a little bit about, well, that’s okay and you probably have some really important ideas and reasons behind why you’re doing what you’re doing. But the buildings are changing, codes are changing, things are, so if you continue to build the way that you’ve been building with these new changes, we’re going to run into problems. so I think that that perspective is really important.

Kristof: (15:38)
Absolutely. Yeah. And I need to remind myself often to stay connected to the individual I’m talking to and saying, look, this individual cares about themselves, their work, their family, this project. That’s why these opinions are coming out and how do I work with that? How do I redirect that in a way like, look, I can tell you really care about what you do. Do you know that buildings use less energy now that the CFM per square foot is down by about a factor of two from what it was a few years ago?

Kelly: (16:09)
Yeah. And I think that the, that’s an interesting thing that I’ve kind of learned on my career journey in the very beginning I think it’s always, why aren’t they paying attention to this thing? Right? Why can’t they just install the air barrier properly? Why can’t they just install a balancing valve? Why can’t they do whatever it is? Why can’t they just, whatever. And that’s from my seat of these are the five things that I’m paying attention to. Why can’t they pay attention to these five things? Well, they’re also paying attention to their own five, 10 millions of things. And so realizing that was an important shift in my ability to work with other people and on teams.

Kristof: (16:49)
Yeah, it’s so easy to go into the blame and it’s so easy to go into, you know, basically like thinking of other people as the issue and yeah, you’re exactly right. It’s a team, but people have different reward kind of reward systems in place for them. Right. The architect would be delivering a design on time and maybe one that hits the budget or the general contractor. Definitely it’s about scheduling budget and yeah. A lot of the things that are invisible suffer because of that. And I think it’s poised to shift with, you know, this is the information age and we’ve talked about the hierarchy, there’s information and then knowledge and then wisdom. So unfortunately we’re only in the information age.

Kelly: (17:34)
We have a lot of data.

Kristof: (17:35)
Would like it to be the wisdom age or something. But in the information age, what’s going to happen in indoor spaces relatively quickly? It’s ongoing. We know this is the overlap of sensors that are going to make the invisible visible for us. I, like you, know a lot of numbers. I know a lot of data, I can measure and I just assumed it kinda like cigarettes. You’d say, look, most people that smoke cigarettes are unhealthy because of it and they can get really bad illnesses. Oh I’ll stop smoking cigarettes. No, it’s data. I’m a data-driven person and I thought if I just communicated the right data in the right way, then the decisions would change. Then people would see the light, you know, like Oh but instead I started studying like well what does change behavior?

Kristof: (18:25)
Cause that’s ultimately what we want. We Don’t need more credentials. We need behavior to change actions, stories change behavior. And now when you talk about stories, you, you end up in this slippery kind of squishy reality where Fake news is sort of in the news now, right? So the stories are very important cause they change behavior. But unless the stories are anchored to fact they are not helping the situation. And so for me as a building science consultant, as an engineer, I can tell you the story that is based in reality of a a man who had asthma for 60 some years and did a home performance retrofit and now hasn’t used an inhaler in seven years. Right? That’s a huge quality of life benefit. And it happens to be real and, but I can also tell others so I can just make up stuff like that. So it’s a weird thing to say that stories changed behavior, therefor we should focus on stories

Kelly: (19:24)
Right? I actually think that’s essential because having that engineering problem solving mindset, I think we think about data and now data itself, I think, I mean we looked at energy data for a building recently, then we got a little bit of occupancy data from that, we tried to adjust, but then we got more occupancy data and it didn’t coordinate with the older data. So sometimes more data just is more confusion, which is its own own topic I think. But I think that there are instances where we can look at a bunch of data and actually have less clarity or we look at it with our own lens and we still have a subjective view even though we say it’s data backed. And so I think we have to be really, really important in our industry, especially, because it’s this combination between hard and soft sciences and how do we address both sides of that? How do we look at the data and interpret it in a way that’s not with our own subjective bias? And then be able to translate that in a way where you can tie into people’s emotions. Cause that’s what you’re saying, is like emotions is where we make we make change. You just warned me about my coffee drinking habits just before we started talking here and and I’m going to continue drinking coffee because I know about that and I’ve weighed the benefits myself, but maybe one day I’ll come over to the other side. But I think, you know, you’re right. If there was something that maybe was more personal to me, if I had a parent that had issues related to some sort of, you know, consumption of, I don’t smoke cigarettes, but maybe that would be, you know, that would be the kind of trigger of something like that. Even though, you know, data wise you’re going to be impacted by this, it’s until you kind of feel it personally.

Kristof: (21:16)
That’s exactly right. So you just brought up something for me. I’m presenting tomorrow at a conference in Houston and one of the things I’m talking about are the five principles of healthy homes, which are: start with a good enclosure, minimize indoor emissions, keep it dry, ventilate, and filter. And we can talk about that, but what I wanted to say is one of the things that gives me solace and gives me hope, as a mechanical designer is, look, keeping it dry, ventilating properly and capturing particulate pollutants, those are really important actions that I don’t need to change anything else that’s going on in this situation and I can make a difference. And where this came to me from was basically this electronic commissioning, this constantly evaluating sensors and shifting things. So I am having success in the industry selling better solutions for indoor air quality based on technologies that have been available for a long time.

Kristof: (22:09)
And that’s a big thing and that’s a good thing. You are having success with sensors and evaluating data and occupancy data and making real time adjustments to save energy. Meanwhile those are like the tip of the iceberg things. Over here we have, why are all these pollutants in the building and in the building materials and why do I need to focus on dry ventilate and filter, you know, can’t we address the root causes? And then even beyond that, when it comes to saving energy through sensors and commissioning, what about the pallet of colors of the building materials that we use today? Why are downtowns, canyons of concrete, glass and steel, the highest embodied energy material? You know, it’s just like the big issues are so big that we as an industry kind of go uhh lets talk about this

Kelly: (22:55)
That’s true. Although the big wood buildings is a big topic, so we’ll have to have a separate whole episode about that. But definitely I think people are talking more about embodied carbon in building materials. But I think we still just don’t know what to do about it. Especially when everybody’s trying to build the tallest this or the biggest that. Were sort of stretching the limits of some materials in some ways. And, you know, we certainly can’t build some of the buildings that we build in New York City out of wood for example.

Kristof: (23:34)
Used in the right way at the right time.

Kelly: (23:38)
I was just gonna say, pivoting us back as I want to be conscious of your your timeline here. I know you’re renovating your own office, so we’ll have to hear back the stories of lessons learned after that. But pivoting us back to the interior space and that some of the things that we can you know, address you’ve mentioned you mentioned to me that, you know, we’re so focused on mold because it’s one of the issues with humidity that we can see that comes up.

Kristof: (24:07)
Thats right, its visable, and therefore important.

Kelly: (24:08)
Right. And so talk to us a little bit more. We’re in Austin right now. It’s hot and humid. It’s getting hotter by the hour here. What are some of the issues that you run into with humidity in buildings that you think people aren’t paying attention or enough attention to yet?

Kristof: (24:23)
Yeah, this gets back to where we were in the beginning of the episode. In some ways where we use, we based most of our decisions in life on the premise that as things are, the way I see them and see is also in that sentence is like interpret them with my mind and my thoughts. Well that’s fundamentally incorrect, right? So we cannot see or perceive the flickering of a fluorescent light, but we know it gives us eye fatigue and headaches over time. So that shows the difference between what I consider the, like the limbic system, the body’s emoting system and sensing system, and the neocortex, which is the one that we relate to. So, hello, I’m Kristof. You’re, you’re Kelly. You know, that’s our neocortex. What’s your favorite color? And so one of the books I was reading not too many years ago talks about our bodies take in between 50,000 and 250,000 more data than it sends to our neocortex. SoOur neocortex is completely woefully uninformed when it comes to damp buildings, mold is visible. People talk about mold a lot. It’s almost as if, if you want to recognize a fairly fast style understanding of indoor environments, you will hear someone talk about mold and mold, mold, mold spores, spore counts, and they won’t talk to you about bacterial endotoxins and, and Dinah flagellates Spiro Keats and you know, all these other things. I mean, there’s just this rich microbiology that we are immersed in and it’s interacting with itself. All of these like mold and mid spores and the spores break into small fragments and bacteria can live on the fragments. The fragments can affect us, the bacteria on the fragments can then affect other bacterial populations in the room.

Kristof: (26:16)
So it’s this incredibly complex, multi-variate, multilayered, rich, dynamic interaction that we say, Oh, it’s mold. Right? It would be nice if it were just mold. It would be much easier to deal with. And so where it needs to go quickly is we just need to understand that keeping buildings dry is very important and that when you allow moisture to get into a space, water does two things fundamentally. It takes things apart. That’s kind of why we wash our hands with it. That’s why we wash things with it. And it causes life to thrive. Right. Most of us are based on acquiesce chemistry. There’s some things living near events in the ocean that are living on different chemistry.

Kelly: (27:00)
Yeah. So that’s interesting. So would you say that maybe most people are thinking, well, whatever moisture content is in my home, unless there’s mold, it’s not a problem. And you’re saying, no, no, no, no, no,

Kristof: (27:16)
That’s great. I am saying, no, no, no, no. You will not see it . Often by the time it gets to be mold, there have been background impacts for could be decades or something like that. Could be years. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Kelly: (27:31)
And so convince me and the other folks listening here, what are the things that I should be worried about when, when I let my home become damp? Even if there’s no mold in there?

Kristof: (27:43)
Well, what impacts is that having the mic or the materials that are becoming damp, are they made out of organic matter so that that can be become food for a bacteria or a fungi. Or other things, right? It can become larger things like parasites and mites. They can live on that. We can start to see those that can be smaller things like viruses. So it’s really hard to, to know. But what we know as an, as a society based on peer reviewed medical research is that the indoor environment, the quality of that, and let’s just right now we’re just talking about let’s say dampness. So damp indoor environments are what correlate with negative health outcomes. It is not fungal communities correlate with health outcomes. So it’s damped indoor environments. It’s also called water damaged buildings, is another way to describe it. And these outcomes, these negative health outcomes, they aren’t just, Oh, I have asthma. Oh, I have breathing difficulties, Oh, I have some sort of symptom that I can logically causally trace back to an indoor air exposure that is now you know like, Oh, I had water and I have mold. Now I have asthma. No, it can be heart disease. It can be strokes. It can be obesity, so if you have someone that’s gaining weight and it’s not responding to diet and exercise, it can be just myriad different things. Problems sleeping, not sleeping deeply, having attention deficit. I mean all of these things are basically triggered by exposure to indoor environments. And I don’t mean just mold spores. I mean particles trumps of spores, molecules and spores, the Dyna flagellate they can break into parts. We breed those things in. And what happens is our body has an immune system. You have an innate and an acquired immune system. I’m realizing this is sprawling out. It’s really, they really the fundamental challenges, this such a big body of knowledge and information and I’m trying to find a path to get us through in a concise manner and it’s like, Whoa, I’m gonna block off this whole room full of knowledge. Right?

Kelly: (29:51)
Yeah. We’ll have to have a series of episodes on this. And we had a health episode earlier, and just talking about, you know, we, as building science professionals or as people who work on buildings that humans are going to live in, we all need to be at least aware that this is an item that we need to be looking into. We need to be paying attention to.

Kristof: (30:16)
Yeah. And I’m going to wrap up where I was and I agree with you completely. It is definitely an item you need to be paying attention to and look into. And it’s like what we talked about, you know, canyons of glass, steel and concrete, but that’s much harder to deal with. Let’s focus on these things are easier to deal with. This problem is so complex that you could almost say it’s too complex for me to make decisions based on it. Yet we do other things in our life like buckling a seat belt, like brushing our teeth that are based more on a precautionary principle. So why is it that when it comes to invisible things, we’re not willing to do it. And the invisible thing that I really wanted to finish that last chain of thought, which is your own immune system once triggered can become the disease itself. And what I mean by that is you can be exposed to things in an indoor environment. We can clear the indoor environment and your body can for decades still be tweaked, still be going like and that is something that is profoundly vast in our society that we’re not paying attention to.

Kelly: (31:19)
Yeah. Wow. You touched a nerve there for me because we have auto immune related issues in my family and that goes back. So that’s it’s interesting, in terms of we talked about how coffee has the inflammatory properties and things that we’re putting into our body and things that are going to do longterm damage.

Kristof: (31:43)
You’re exactly right and saying there’s a story there that you can feel your emotions getting triggered. Autoimmune disorders, inflammatory responses are absolutely triggered by indoor environmental exposures all the time.

Kelly: (31:55)
So now that our audience is completely overwhelmed and worried about and maybe are going to pinch pitch tents now in the wilderness or something, what do you think is, is one thing that all of us can take to our next project to try to improve this issue of, of damp buildings specifically

Kristof: (32:21)
The enclosure is very important for dampness right? Air leakage from outside of the human climate is a big problem and getting your control layers right. Just around the corner here, there’s a residential building that was just built maybe a year ago. They’re peeling off all this stucco almost because solar driven radiation, solar driven moisture diffusion, they have control layers that are all vapor open. They put zip on and then tie back on and then the pelt. And the only reason I can think of that they’re pulling all the stucco off a year into this beautiful architect design custom home is moisture issues. And so here was a team that tried to do it right but it wasn’t based on enough science. So that keeping it dry is thinking about the enclosure and it’s thinking about what is the system that dries it? Is it the cooling and heating system? Probably not. It’s probably a drying system in our climate. Soon as you do what you need to do to make basically a fairly air tight enclosure that’s resistant to moisture, well now ventilation and filtration become very important, as do your decisions and actions as an owner about what cream did I put on my skin, what, what do I do to freshen my air? I’m using air quotes there. Yeah its complex.

Kelly: (33:36)
Okay. So it’s complex, but I think in terms of taking away thinking, I mean it goes back to what we, as building science people actually have been saying for years and years, which is build tight ventilate right. So that’s actually what we’re, what we’re getting back to in it. And to your point about getting the control layers right, they did what they were supposed to do. They insulated, they put an air barrier in but it’s actually not just the putting the air barrier in. I was at a commissioning conference and we talked a lot about building enclosure commissioning. The actual surface of the material that is your air barrier is not the problem. It’s wherever your interfaces are. So can we pay a little bit more attention to the details? You say the tyranny of enclosures, right? We’ve been so focused on enclosures but I think we’ve been focused on; you need an air barrier, you need an air barrier material. Here are some air barrier materials. I think we still are struggling as an industry in terms of the enclosure details.

Kristof: (34:39)
Yeah. And we, and we struggle as a society with with solutions that are not based on purchases. Right. It’s great to buy a Prius. It’s great to buy a Tesla. It’s not as easy to buy powerwall batteries, but if people want to, or the electronic commissioning that’s based on controls that are available, the filter ventilate and dry, right. Those are product based solutions. VRF systems. What’s hard is exactly what you say. It’s not just interfaces between materials, it’s interfaces between trades. And the architecture makes a difference. Can you not have the building constantly moving in and out in the vertical plane? Yeah, so it’s behavior changes, and wrapping this up, is that we spend around 80 years- that’s the average life expectancy right now, inside. I’m sorry, alive, spend 80 years alive, 70 of that inside of buildings. So it’s, it’s really poignant. I would like to see groups like delos with the WELL standard, I would like to have them to say, you know what, we’re going to start with wherever people’s beds are. Cause that’s where most of the time is. They currently don’t do residential. They certainly don’t do single family residential. I hope that’s their aspiration. But we tend to start our large new building certifications in commercial buildings because there’s more fee I guess there. There’s more square footage. I don’t know exactly why I’m guessing. Tell me why

Kelly: (36:10)
I see. I would say I think the reason is we had the historically spent a lot of time focusing on efficiency in larger like office buildings. But actually energy is like an order of magnitude or two less per square foot that you’re paying per square foot, then the humans you’re paying to employ. And so an increase in 10% inefficiency is just so insignificant compared to a 10 increase in productivity. And there’s a cog effects study that we referenced, and it’s hard a little bit to measure kind of human interaction cognition around the home. But when you’re thinking about it in an office perspective, it’s significantly easier, and you can kind of see how you can increase productivity of employees by increasing ventilation rates or by using you know, better materials or whatever it is. And so I think that is probably why the focus is there, but I think you’re absolutely right in terms of bringing it back to the home and you talk a little bit about, you know, we spend a lot of our time in our homes and so we, you know, we like to talk about big buildings and the bigger the better and whatever, but in terms of bigger time spend, you’re in your home most of the time.

Kristof: (37:41)
Yeah. Let’s see. I’m gonna pause for a minute. Get my thoughts. Cause you said something. Well, I’m just gonna go with this. So the positive energy name when we started it, relates to what you just said, which is that it was obviously about net positive energy buildings. It was also about yes, we can do this. Yes we can as an industry. And it was also about, and this is you maybe living in Austin, which is kind of woo woo, which is the, when you make a home healthy and the parents and children’s cognition is better and they slept more deeply, their lives are better, right? That’s the positive energy. And one of the things there is that people love, like we just talked, we just talked about energy code. We talked about energy code in this podcast and you just talked about energy efficient and there’s this adjective operational versus embodied that is wonderful that it’s starting to get called out. Like, so the international energy conservation code is actually the international operational energy conservation code. We’re not interested in conserving invited energy yet. We’re starting to be, but we’re mainly answered in operational energy.

Kelly: (38:50)
Right. That’s an excellent point. And so to my point, and we’ll wrap up here, that was an excellent conversation. We took a little bit of a windy path, but what I like to ask is when we have you back on the podcast in five years what do you think we’ll be talking about then?

Kristof: (39:12)
I so hope we’re talking about embodied energy and putting this time element back in, cradle to cradle. Like, so that piece of steel, where did it come from and where is it going? It’s not just all about my building, it’s about resources. So that’s one thing I hope and I can see a shift happening. I mean we are talking about to make a crazy metaphor like the organic food section of the building industry and living here in Austin, Whole foods started here, so it was always easy, but I would go to other cities like Corpus Christi 10 years ago and good luck finding organic produce. And now there’s big sections. So large swaths of the country are interested in organic produce. And so I think large swaths in the industry are gonna be interested in buildings that are healthy.

Kelly: (40:01)
Great. That’s an excellent note to end on.

Heather: (40:05)
Thank you for listening to buildings and beyond. For more information about the topics discussed today, visit www.swinter.com/podcast and check out the episode show notes, buildings and beyond is brought to you by Steven winter associates. We provide energy, green building and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment our professionals have led the way since 1972 and the development of best practices to achieve high performance buildings. I’ve production team for today’s episode includes Dylan Martello, Alex Mirabile, and myself. Heather Breslin, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Steve Klocke, RA

Steve Klocke is a Senior Sustainability Consultant at Steven Winter Associates and a registered architect with 18+ years of experience in architectural design and building science consulting in residential buildings. He provides comprehensive green building certification support for the LEED for Homes, ENERGY STAR and Indoor airPLUS programs with a focus on lowrise multi-unit new construction and gut rehabs.

Steve is an integral part of the initial strategic planning sessions and workshops with builders, architects, and homeowners, setting goals and scopes of work for projects. The certification support he provides for project teams includes energy and building systems analysis, architectural design support, and project management. As a HERS Rater and LEED for Homes Green Rater, Steve inspects projects under construction for compliance with energy performance, durability, and health and safety standards. His performance testing expertise includes whole-house infiltration and duct leakage, as well as infrared thermal imaging.

The residential building industry has made incredible progress toward sustainability and energy efficiency goals. At the same time, Senior Sustainability Consultant and Registered Architect Steve Klocke finds many new buildings under-performing because designers continue to make simple, avoidable mistakes.

Based on lessons he’s learned from certifying over 1,200 dwelling units over the past seven years, Steve discusses the top ten multifamily design mistakes being made over and over again – and how to avoid them. On this episode, Steve uncovers mistakes 6-10. Be sure to check out Part 1 of this episode if you haven’t already!

Presentation slides (mostly graphics): Top 10 Multifamily Design Mistakes

Steve’s Top 10 Multifamily Design Mistakes:

Other Resources:

 What comes to Robb’s mind when Steve mentions illicit, high-flow shower heads…

Send your feedback and questions to [email protected]

Buildings and Beyond is the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Buildings and Beyond is a production of Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building, and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. For more information, visit swinter.com.

Hosts: Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby

Production Team: Heather Breslin | Alex Mirabile | Dylan Martello

Kelly : (00:06)
Welcome to buildings and beyond

Robb: (00:08)
The podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment

Kelly : (00:13)
By focusing on efficiency, accessibility and health.

Robb: (00:18)
I’m Rob Aldrich

Kelly : (00:19)
And I’m Kelly Westby.

Robb: (00:22)
This week is part two in my conversation with Steve Klocke, architect and rater here at Steven Winter Associates. We were talking about his top 10 frustrations, top 10 multifamily design mistakes. And this week we talk about the second five on his list. We start by talking about lighting controls, which was probably the one that I found most surprising.

Steve: (00:48)
Here’s the deal.

Robb: (00:49)
All right. I was surprised to see this on your list. I was.

Steve: (00:52)
Really? Because this is so often done poorly.

Robb: (00:56)
And again, we’re talking about multifamily buildings. When there are just lights that are on always is that the issue?

Steve: (01:02)
as far as I can tell, the only reasons to have lights on all the time is if you’re growing pot, which is certainly legal for some of you. Or in areas of, you know, Egress, et cetera. The trick is, in areas of egress. So there’s a lot of different parts of the code and lot of different codes that apply to lighting. So here’s the jist. 10 foot candle is the norm for supplying illumination to a space. Let’s focus on Egress, I guess, cause that’s areas that usually get screwed up. But when it’s not, when an ingress area is not in use, you can go down to as low as one foot candle and that a big jump in consumption of energy. So, you know, there’s parts of the energy code that says you have to have occupancy sensors in these, you know, dozen spaces. It doesn’t say you can’t have occupancy sensors in these other spaces, right? And so it’s a misinterpretation of the problem.

Robb: (02:11)
So really, it’s not that people are lazy and don’t care about energy. But sometimes they think the code forbids?

Steve: (02:20)
That’s my impression. Yeah. You know, and the rooms like electrical rooms, for safety reasons, et cetera. I’m not gonna argue with that. But you know, a lot of times you’re going to have these stairs where in some buildings we have, you know, for security reasons they don’t want people to use the stairs. And so they actually kind of make it harder to use the stairs. And yet they’ve got the lights on 24/7 full blast in there and just kills me. And so really what you need to do is put in controls. It’s all about controls. You know this from an engineering standpoint, Rob, it’s all about controls. And now, occupancy sensor, vacancy sensor, what’s the difference? An occupancy sensor will turn on when someone enters the room and it’ll turn off after a certain period afterwards once it stops sensing that person in there. A vacancy sensor, you typically will turn on yourself and then it’ll turn itself off. And there are some spaces where one is appropriate and some of the places where the other is appropriate.

Robb: (03:21)
And that’s not a timer? You turn it on, and then there is an occupancy sensor that senses you leave

Steve: (03:27)
In this room we’re sitting in right now, It is an occupancy sensor, and it doesn’t matter if the sun is shining bright through the windows, this light comes on, which drives me nuts. And it will eventually shut off, but you know, think of all the startup, you know, wear and tear on the lights, and the consumption, et cetera. And so, you know, an occupancy sensor makes sense in your egress areas where, look, if it’s an emergency, you don’t want someone have to flip the switch and turn the lights on and you know a hundred people plowing over you because you’re the first one through the door.

Robb: (03:59)
I see. So, a vacancy sensor, in this office in which we’re recording, for instance, if someone walked into this office just to empty the trash, or just came in to get some more coffee. You have to turn on the light.

Steve: (04:23)
Yes.

Robb: (04:23)
In a lot of the offices, there’s plenty of natural light. So this would be a great place for a vacancy sensor.

Steve: (04:35)
Agreed, but not in in egress area.

Robb: (04:35)
In multifamily buildings, what places are good for vacancy sensors?

Steve: (04:50)
So offices, closets, exercise rooms, mail rooms, trash rooms. As far as I’m concerned. I suppose you could do an occupancy sensor in there because most of them are internal and don’t have any windows. But you know, in your egress areas, your corridors and all of those places, you definitely want an occupancy sensor for safety. And we’ll never try to pick a fight with a code official. I mean, we know where we stand, but there are nuances that are being missed

Robb: (05:21)
And they’re getting better and cheaper, is that right?

Steve: (05:25)
Yeah, and I guess you have to balance the short term versus long term cost implications. Look, if you’re selling this building and you’re not paying for the utilities or whatever, you’re going to put in whatever’s cheapest. If you’re maintaining the building, keeping it, you know you are going to want something that’s going to minimize your operating costs and so there’s that issue too,

Robb: (05:42)
These are things that don’t come into the ratings a lot of the times.

Steve: (05:44)
They’re required under some certifications and basically what it comes down to is an argument. With me, they’re like, “hey, you can’t do this.” and I’m like, “well no, you can, you just need to try a little harder.” You try to say that without hurting anybody’s feelings or sounding like a jerk, which is not always achieved by yours truly.

Robb: (06:07)
Moving on, I’m going to let you talk about this one: oversized HPAC.

Steve: (06:16)
I’m glad that as the engineer in the room, Robb differs to the architect in the room to talk about oversized HPAC. I think it’s going to be a testament to how well I’ve been trained by the engineers here at Steven winter associates. So the keyword here is short cycling and it doesn’t mean a whole lot of people on bicycles that are short of stature. That’s the slide in my presentation, is my bicycling team from rag rye in Iowa. Anyway, short cycling means that your equipment is typically of a single speed. It turns on hard, runs hard, shuts off, and it does that in rapid succession. And so what you get is, the analogy I use, is a car or like, let’s say you’re in a taxi or something like that, if you’re in a crown Vic with a v8 engine, you get in there, the driver pounds on the gas until he hits a red light and then pounds on the brakes. So not only is he wearing out the vehicle faster, he’s consuming way more gas than should he’s, making you sick in the back seat, et cetera. So if you apply it to HVAC, you know, humidification, or dehumidification I should say, is the hot topic now as we keep getting these warm, wet summers that seem to be warmer and wetter than the past. I’m not going to digress into any sort of questionable theories, don’t want to make any enemies here, but good thing our house is on a hill here in Norwalk. Anyway, so you’re not pulling that latent heat- that ones for your benefit Robb. Which means “moisture” to the rest of the architects out there.

Robb: (07:41)
Thanks for clarifying, cause I wasn’t going to, I was like, yeah, of course, you’re right. That’s I think one of the biggest, probably the biggest issue with oversizing- is not dehumidifying in a warm or humid climate you really don’t get the dehumidification.

Steve: (08:33)
Yeah so you’re not achieving the efficiency that your equipment is rated to cause of short cycling, you’re wearing it out, you’re not getting dehumidification on the cooling side and it’s just uncomfortable. You know, like who wants a cold hard blast of air on their necks every 10 minutes, right? You’d rather have sort of a more even, smooth operation, ramp up a little bit, ramp down a little bit, smooth operator is what we aim for.

Robb: (08:56)
It’s interesting. So you can make an argument that some fuel fired heating systems, there’s not a big efficiency to oversizing.

Steve: (09:13)
Sure, especially those that ramp down. Like, you know, boilers for example, can go at a 10th of their…what’s that term Mr. engineer? Modulating but uh, turn down?

Robb: (09:25)
Turn down. Sure.

Steve: (09:26)
Yeah. That’s the term I’m looking for.

Robb: (09:27)
Yeah. If you could modulate down 90%, turn it down 90% that’s pretty good. But I think it’s a comfort issue. It’s a humidity issue and it’s a cost issue. Especially with air conditioning, I mean you put in twice the capacity you need, you pay almost twice as much

Steve: (09:46)
Yeah but Robb what if you’re going to add on some day? You really want that extra capacity man.

Robb: (09:53)
We’re talking about multifamily buildings, who’s going to add on Steve?

Steve: (09:58)
Anyway, next one.

Robb: (10:04)
Next one, and actually, I’ve been dealing with this tons lately on the oversize HVAC with heat pumps, which are really taking over in a lot of things.

Steve: (10:19)
Everybody thinks that “oh, the heat pump is no problem.” Is totally up and down, up and down

Robb: (10:24)
It has some really big efficiency and comfort potential drawbacks when you oversize.

Steve: (10:30)
Oh yeah. Well I was in a townhome in Brooklyn, in Park Slope actually, with millions of dollars of art on the walls and it’s getting ruined because they got these great VRS systems, but they’re just too darn big

Robb: (10:43)
Yeah. No good. We need to do another episode on humidity. Too much. Too much. All right. Moving on for real this time. Antiquated ventilation.

Steve: (10:56)
Yeah, so I start this one off in my presentation with the old school way of dumping a bunch of air into your corridors, undercutting your apartment entry doors and expecting the air to get into the apartments. Not only is it not allowed by mechanical code, it’s not allowed by fire code.

Robb: (11:16)
With an exhaust fan? So we’re talking about an exhaust fan..

Steve: (11:20)
You have exhaust out of your apartment and make up air. Make up air is, I realized, that it’s important in some areas in this area, it’s not applicable. Make up air is coming from the wrong place. You don’t want to be pumping air into the middle of the building and expecting it to get to where it needs to be. You need to control the air. So by antiquated ventilation, we’re basically meaning we’ve got to take it up a couple of notches. And let’s turn the equation backwards. What if we have central exhaust and then we’ve got a trickle vent scenario, there are some things like that. You know, and we unfortunately were pretty guilty of this. We’ve said for a while based on program clarification, that trickled vents are required and I’ve done a few studies, I’m fairly sure you can tell me better, that show that they really don’t work all that well cause you get all kinds of stratification and tall buildings and stack effect and all kinds of funny things are happening. When you take control away from your ventilation system, it needs to be controlled.

Robb: (12:19)
In both the exhaust and supply.

Steve: (12:22)
Exactly. Both sides.

Robb: (12:23)
Okay. You can’t do one and hope the other side works itself out. And for a century that’s been the standard, where you just suck air from the kitchens, you have a big mushroom fan on the roof, a big stack sucks air from bathrooms and kitchens and there you go. You’re all done.

Steve: (12:45)
Well I still get asked why we have to have exhausted in kitchens.

Speaker 2: (12:50)
Kelly’s doing a separate episode on that one.

Steve: (12:53)
Okay we’re just not going to dwell on that one.

Robb: (12:56)
Its a hot topic. Because passive house and IQ people are butting heads over it.

Steve: (13:02)
Yeah, I stay out of that.

Robb: (13:05)
So what would you like to see? Are we talking balanced ventilation. Are we talking HRVs, what’s good?

Steve: (13:12)
Well, it’s a matter of what you can stomach.

Robb: (13:14)
We talking money?

Steve: (13:15)
Yeah, basically. Yeah. I mean, the extreme end of the spectrum is balanced ventilation through an ERV/HRV. I feel like that’s the direction that you know, code is going to go eventually as soon the people who have been fighting it thus far run out of gas. And Robb says, no by reading his body language. I just don’t see how with more and more studies that come out about the value of indoor air quality, I just don’t see how we can keep not doing that.

Robb: (13:56)
I don’t disagree. And once again, this is a whole other topic, but so many of the balanced ventilation systems, I see ERVs and HRVs, they may not be installed properly, and that’s a big deal. They may not work from day one and if they do work on day one, they’re maintained so poorly or not at all, that they don’t work even like six, nine months after occupancy. So that’s a big deal. And that I think is one of the more valid arguments against mandating ERVs and HRVs. But you can’t argue with the performance benefits with the health benefits, with the indoor air quality benefits.

Steve: (14:37)
Well, in our house, we renovated LEED Platinum, exhaust only ventilation strategy, meets Ashrae, all the boxes are checked. And then after living in it a year, we were like, no, it’s too stuffy. I feel like I’m physically affected because I don’t have enough fresh air. And so we put the ERV in and it literally was a night and day difference. And so here’s the deal. Do they cost more to install? Yes. Do they cost more to operate? Yes.

Robb: (15:10)
Well the energy savings can certainly make up for it

Steve: (15:15)
Right. Well, in our house at least, we had turned up the flow rate above the exhaust only, what we had for exhaust only. So in our case, that was the case that it costs more to operate and there’s more air to heat and cool basically. And it took up space in the attic, Yada, Yada, Yada. But you know what? I mean when it’s your family and you don’t think you’re as healthy as you should be, I mean, it’s a no brainer. Now as a designer, it’s different, you know, but in my presentation, I say, look, try to think if it was your kid, your family, and if you’re living in these apartments.. I know what the constraints are, but you know, it’s something to consider. I tug at the heartstrings.

Robb: (16:03)
There’s no argument about the benefits. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. And there’s better ways to do it. Maybe there are better products coming.

Steve: (16:14)
Yeah. We’re slow to it here in the U.S. I mean, I guess,

Robb: (16:18)
And in Canada it’s very common. And in a multifamily building with good property managers, with good owners, good maintenance, they can be maintained very well.

Steve: (16:31)
I mean do you buy a car and not change the oil every, you know, 5,000 miles or whatever?

Robb: (16:36)
Most people don’t but on the ERV’s and HRVs, most people do.

Steve: (16:43)
This is the luxury I have of it just being an hour presentation. Say what you’re doing wrong and not worry about the bigger consequences.

Robb: (16:51)
Alright enough about ventilation.

Steve: (16:56)
I know you want to dwell on that, but maybe that’s a whole other podcast

Robb: (16:58)
We could go on and on and on. But we won’t, okay. Domestic hot water.

Steve: (17:04)
Domestic hot water. So I had always wondered before I got into this, how the hotel hot water works. How is it that it’s a big hotel and I can turn on the faucet and I get hot water right away? Scolding hot water. And I wonder how does that work? And now I know, right? There’s hot water coursing through the building 24/7. And so you can’t get around that. I mean, people are going to want their hot water and not have to wait for it. So at this point, the best you can do is make that system as efficient as you can. And that means, this is the most technical part of the presentation, there’s a diagram showing a three pipe domestic hot water re-circulation system and a box design. And basically all it is, is taking the hot water return and shortening those runs instead of taking them back down the risers that they came up. So, in a multifamily building, you’re going to hopefully have your hot water generation on the roof, it’s coming down a shaft in the middle of the building and then getting distributed horizontally and then back up again into the various apartments and it goes back down again over again and then up again. Right? So instead of taking the return water back down to the building, you just take it across the top of the building. You take a shortcut back to where it came from in the first place. And so basically if you can reduce your pipe length, if you can also reduce your pipe diameter, so surface area, right? And if you can insulate them. Well back to pipe diameter, I mean in New York City at least, we have to have low flow fixtures, in any of our green programs, you have to have low flow fixtures, and engineers are still designing their pipes to the higher medium on that ASHRAE chart. Right. And so they should be going no more than the low because unless everybody in the building yanked their shower head on the first day they move in and puts in, you know, nine gallon permit or whatever, you don’t need those big pipes. So bigger pipes, bigger loss. Yeah. So longer pipes, more loss, and insulation, just making sure you’ve got your details in there, keep those things insulated.

Robb: (19:34)
I will put the link to one of your PowerPoints up on the site. And others here have done some work on this because it’s much easier to get a handle on this when you’re looking at diagrams in my opinion

Steve: (19:46)
Yeah. It’s a very visual thing.

Robb: (19:48)
Yeah. But, but you’re right. I mean it’s the oversizing thing again, it’s overkill, you know? It’s a CYA.

Steve: (19:54)
Yeah. Not throwing engineers under the bus, but you are a conservative lot. I’m just going to say it.

Robb: (20:03)
And good thing. It’s not inappropriate. That’s not a bad thing

Steve: (20:11)
Sometimes.

Robb: (20:13)
Alright. And how about controls for DHW distribution?

Steve: (20:16)
I didn’t get into that. You are welcome to. Robb, tell me about controls.

Robb: (20:16)
So like you said, in hotels, there’s this big loop that’s pumped 24/7. And in hotels and in larger multifamily buildings, that’s pretty much necessary to pump 24/7. In smaller multifamily buildings, I think there’s potential for demand control. So super simply, there’s like a flow switch that senses if anybody is calling for hot water and whenever anybody’s calling for hot water, then a pretty large pump comes on, primes the system very quickly. So people wait, you know, very short amount of time. But then when nobody’s calling for hot water, it shuts off. And you’re not recirculating hot water throughout the building.

Steve: (21:08)
Midnight to 4:00 AM

Robb: (21:11)
You don’t want to discriminate against people on the second shift.

Steve: (21:14)
No, I’m just saying though that you know, instead of running full blast all night. I mean like you said, there’s savings to be had there. Yeah, for sure.

Robb: (21:22)
All right, we’ll move on. Last but not least, poor communication.

Steve: (21:29)
Yeah, so is that a design mistake? And so here’s what I say: yes it is. Because what is your job as an architect or an engineer? What is your product? I should say. Your product is not the building. Your product is not the MEP systems. Your product is the design, is the drawings and specs. That’s your deliverable. And so if you cannot convey what you’re trying to achieve through those drawings and specs, you’re not living up to, you know, your role as designer. And so it’s making sure that you’re getting everything that you need to on paper, but you’re also getting the feedback you need. So architects, are you listening to your engineers or are you just throwing background drawings at them and expecting them to make it work with whatever? You know architects, they got their hands full with all kinds of other things. Right? And so, it’s just one more input to this whole big machine that technically they’re responsible for. But the best projects I’ve seen is where the architects and engineers have a real partnership and they communicate back and forth. And you know, an engineer will tell an architect, “well, why are you drawing it like that? Why don’t you, if you could just do this, this and this, our systems would be that much smaller.” And you know, so it’s got to be a two-way street as far as communication

Robb: (23:02)
And there are more and more people involved like through the raider to the passive house consultant to the sustainability consultant. I mean, if your feedback gets incorporated.

Steve: (23:11)
this might be slightly biased, but yes, one big important point is listen to your consultants and actually have that two way dialogue. We’re not here to just tell you how much your design is not right. We want the building to be better. We’ve been improving the built environment since 1972 fairly sure. Six years before I was born. I was thinking about it. But anyway, it’s also construction, I mean, I was up in an attic out in long island on a Tuesday this week and we’re up there and I’m like, I’m sorry guys, you just got sort of backed into a corner here. Like, I couldn’t have done this any better than you did, but it’s still not where it needs to be because of the limitations that were placed on you by the design. And so, you know, the good architects will get out there and they’ll get their boots dirty and they’ll talk to the people who are actually building their buildings and they’ll learn from it.

Robb: (24:12)
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you learn so much being on the field and seeing the screw ups more than anything else.

Steve: (24:22)
Learning from mistakes. Yeah. Well and not even necessarily mistakes, but maybe just things that could have been done better. If you can get out there and communicate with the guys and Gals who are actually making it happen, they have a lot they could teach you. And I learn every time I go out, I learned something from just some random plumber, like, oh, I’m going to put that in my toolbox and contribute that in the future because I would’ve never known.

Robb: (24:52)
And it goes both ways. I’ve explained to various trades, the importance of an air barrier, what we’re trying to accomplish. And it’s not necessarily straightforward.

Steve: (25:06)
No. And I get a lot of good suggestions there. They’re like “what if we did it like this?” And I’m like, “yeah, you could do it like that,” you know? Yeah. So just as designers, I don’t know if the siloing is the right term, but don’t put yourself in a place where you’re not willing to take feedback, basically. So communication is making sure what you’re putting out there is good in the first place. And then, you know, being willing to hear feedback on it and the other thing, and it actually feathers back into number two, which is designer regularities. You know, engineers are really good at having a pile of stock details that they’ll apply depending on what kind of system they’re working with. Architects not so much. Some are. I don’t think, at least personally. I don’t feel, I mean, and it’s not like if here’s dealing a window detail from scratch every time you’re, you’re doing exactly. If you redrawing the same detail two or three times, it’s a bad detail from the beginning. So what you do is, you learn from good designs, you put them in your own little virtual toolbox, right? You say, for wood construction, this is how we do it. For steel construction, this is how we do it. You’ve got those stock details, use Them. Instead of wasting your time trying to redesign the wheel a little bit every time, build yourself a good stable of details, and then either a. charge your clients less. There you go. There’s one thing. Make the project affordable overall, b. spend your extra time on making the building better in other ways or c. just go golfing, spend some time with your kids, be happy. whatever. Right? Like why are we spending our time with these cutesy, wootsy little details. You know, I’ve got a builder in New Jersey, who does affordable senior living developments. And in an 80 unit building, there are three unique designs, three. Guess what? He can’t build these things fast enough. People love them. They’re relatively efficient. And so it’s like, are they winning any design awards? Not necessarily. But is he providing affordable, healthy, efficient places for elderly people who need that sort of thing? Yeah. I mean, it’s nice to have a design trophy on your shelf, but gosh, I don’t know. I would sleep pretty good if I was saying that I was providing that, you know?

Robb: (27:51)
Right on. That’s 10. We did pretty good. Less than an hour. Yeah. Anything, any other concluding comments? Anything to wrap up?

Steve: (28:04)
Yeah so basically, at the beginning of the presentation, here’s where it starts. Designed decisions made in the office have a snowball effect throughout both the design process, the construction process and the life of the building. Right? And the earlier you can make good decisions, the better off your building’s going to be in perpetuity. And so someone asked me, as I was asking around the office, you know, like for suggestions on design mistakes, and what I should incorporate in this thing, and he said, “well, have you thought about why people keep making these bad design mistakes?” And you know, that’s a good question. It’s very meta or whatever you want to say. But I thought about it and it’s like, you know, design is just decisions. It is decision after decision after decision after decision, its endless. I mean, that’s really all design is, is you’re deciding to do one thing or another, right? So here’s the thing. If you don’t know, that’s what design is, how can you actually make good decisions, right? How can you move your design forward if you don’t realize that every time you put that pencil down to paper, which nobody does anymore obviously, but every time you click that mouse you’re making a decision. So you know, valuing those decisions is important and super hard to keep in mind and also very fluffy. But really that’s where it’s at. I mean, because who else is going to do it? I mean all these buildings keep popping up. Do they happen spontaneously? No. People are drawing them. People are developing them.

Robb: (29:37)
Right. So being mindful, being conscious, learning.

Steve: (29:42)
Yup. There it is.

Robb: (29:46)
Thank you very much Steve.

Speaker 4: (29:52)
Thank you for listening to buildings and beyond. For more information about the topics discussed today, visit www.swinter.com/podcast and check out the episode show notes buildings and beyond is brought to you by Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. Our professionals have led the way since 1972 and the development of best practices to achieve high performance buildings. The production team for today’s episode includes Dylan Martello, Alex Mirabile, and myself. Heather Breslin, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.