Buildings + Beyond Podcast

Marc Zuluaga

Marc Zuluaga has directed energy audits on over 20 million square feet of existing buildings and leads a team committed to applying a rigorous technical approach to the evaluation and implementation of a wide range of building upgrades. Most notably, Marc has worked since 2005 to pioneer a retrofit approach to central exhaust ventilation systems in multifamily buildings, working openly and collaboratively with practitioners across the country. More recently, in research sponsored by the Urban Green Council, Marc acted as the team leader on a project to quantify the winter heat loss due to air leakage around window and sleeve air conditioners in NYC. The study, titled “There Are Holes in Our Walls,” found that these gaps collectively represent a hole the size of a Manhattan block, resulting in an annual operating cost penalty of $130 – $180 million dollars. Marc has also provided technical input to inform various policy initiatives; in 2010, he served on the NYC Green Codes Task Force that was convened by the Mayor’s Office to recommend green changes to the laws and regulations affecting buildings in New York.

Considered one of the most ambitious and innovative legislative initiatives of any major U.S. city, New York City’s Climate Mobilization Act has significant implications for property owners. The most significant bill in the package, Introduction 1253, will hold owners accountable for their buildings’ energy performance by mandating buildings over 25,000 SF to reduce their emissions 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050, with incremental targets along the timeline.

In this episode, Kelly sits down with SWA’s CEO, Marc Zuluaga to learn more about what is being referred to as NYC’s Green New Deal – and what it means for NYC’s real estate market. Marc breaks down the details of the bill and shares some advice for building owners and managers.

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

Mary Jo Peterson

Mary Jo Peterson is an award-winning author, speaker, educator, and designer with over 25 years of experience. She is president of Mary Jo Peterson, Inc, a design studio and consulting firm established in 1993 with specialized expertise in kitchen, bath, and universal/accessible design. The firm offers consulting services to private clients, manufactures of product, and builders/developers/architects in the design of universal spaces and products. Prominent projects include design for Del Webb, Pulte, and other major homebuilders, demonstration exhibit space for GE Appliances, Jenn-Air, and Hafele, and everyone’s favorite, the Betty Crocker Kitchens at General Mills in Minneapolis, MN. Ms. Peterson has contributed to the development of new national universal design standards introduced in 2013. Author of Universal Interiors by Design (McGraw-Hill Professional, 1999) and Universal Kitchen and Bathroom Planning (McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing, 1998) as well as Kitchen Planning and Bath Planning of the NKBA resource library (latest edition, Wiley, 2013), Ms. Peterson has been elected by her peers to the NKBA Hall of Fame. She is author and instructor of the universal design courses offered by NKBA. Named by NAHB as CAPS Educator of the Year 2014, she is an author/instructor of the CAPS and UD/Build programs of NAHB. Involved with government and advocacy groups, Mary Jo works at integrating universal access and sustainability into home and product design, and actively promotes change and education towards the integration of access, sustainability, and beautiful design. Read more

Universal Design recognizes that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to design and construction. By incorporating Universal Design features into the built environment, we can accommodate for the widest variety of people, regardless of their limitations.

But, while the buzz around Universal Design is growing, we still receive many questions surrounding what it means for a specific project and where it can be applied.

To help answer these questions, we’ve asked Universal Design expert and award-winning author, Mary Jo Peterson, to share her knowledge of the topic and provide some examples of what it might mean for a specific project.

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: (00:05)
Welcome to buildings and beyond.

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

Kelly: (00:12)
By focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Robb: (00:17)
I’m Robb Aldrich.

Kelly: (00:18)
And I’m Kelly Westby. You may be thinking, so what is this universal design thing anyway? While the name would imply otherwise. Universal design is often associated with a tool for handling the needs of people with disability or perhaps in association with aging in place. But Mary Jo talks about universal design as just good design practice. Mary Jo built her own company in 1993 to assist private homeowners and design build professionals around the country achieve state of the art solutions for kitchen and bath designs. Mary Jo’s own journey to universal design came from a desire to support people with disabilities to make their homes easier for them to use and then realizing she could use her approach to improve flexibility and access for everyone. Mary Jo is constantly asking herself and those around her, how can we incorporate clever, beautiful elements that improve human performance? If you care about having a space that is easier to use and makes you feel good at the same time or if you want to design such a space for someone else, you will definitely want to keep listening. So let’s just jump right in.

Kelly: (01:26)
So Mary Jo, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Mary Jo: (01:29)
Happy to be here.

Kelly: (01:31)
And thanks for welcoming us into your home for the podcast.

Mary Jo: (01:35)
I’m always happy for that.

Kelly: (01:38)
I like to set the scene a little bit with some definitions, so just to get us on the same page and our listeners as well. Can you start just by explaining what your definition of universal design is?

Mary Jo: (01:50)
Yeah, I’d like to, in fact, it’s a pleasure to have the chance to help clarify because it’s a philosophy and an approach to design that people don’t always get their arms around and when we finally embrace it, we really don’t have to have a name anymore. It’s just good design. But in fact, the name universal design refers to, by formal definition, the design of products and spaces so that they will, with respect for the differences in people, be usable by as many people as possible. The UN has a definition that I think kind of adds to that. It talks about freedom to choose. So freedom, again, I think it’s about that respect of people in differences. If I speak Spanish and you speak English, if, if a space has been designed universally, then that sign will be a figure and we both know that it means that that’s where the women’s room is, right? You know that kind of thing. So, yeah, that’s a great example. It’s a lot about respect.

Kelly: (02:54)
Yeah and I’ve seen another slight difference in definition, I think it’s from a book by Steinfeld and Measel, that it encourages the design of spaces that empower a diverse population by improving human performance, health and wellness and social participation.

Mary Jo: (03:12)
Right. That’s a more contemporary definition.

Kelly: (03:15)
Right. And what do you think about the health and wellness aspect of bringing that into design? Where are we with that?

Mary Jo: (03:22)
I think it’s perfect. I have always thought that universal design spoke to health, you know, other terms, universal design, inclusive design, I think Ed Steinfeld likes to refer to inclusive design. Same kind of deal, but when we refer to health and wellness, we’re talking about a proactive approach that we’re going to create spaces and products that will support people through the changes that may occur in their life and in the life of the spaces that they’re living in. And that really is more of a positive, mo re of a proactive, and that’s what universal design is supposed to be. I think when we define it, we can’t ignore the other terms that are out there. So we talk about accessibility and we talk about universal design and it’s very hard for people who are down in the trenches of it to figure out what’s what there. And I think that if you look at it this way, access really refers to disability. It really refers to creating something that will support someone with respect for a specific disability. It also is a term that is used in compliance in the standards for the ADA, for Fair housing. So it has a very specific definition and it’s also like a solution to a problem. So a ramp would be acceptable as an accessible solution, right? It would be a sloped walkway if it was universal design because you’d want it not to be so visible. You’d want it to be, it has to be, beautiful. You know, I think there are three things that builders often ask me, what 10 things can I do? So I have incorporated universal design and I just want to do that in every house. And I say, no, every house is different. This is really an approach to design. But if there are three things, you know, I would say that this is a design that you have to create it so that it’s something we aspire to. And my best example of that is if you think of a hearing aid and then think of an air pod, we aspire to one, we like one, we think it’s cool. We want to have that in our ear. The other one, we want to hide it, make it go away. So universal design, we need to aspire to it. We also need to make it the standard. It needs to be part of every project that we approach. Every design of product or a space that we approach, because what we’re doing is trying to create some flexibility in that product so that it can be used by the tall and short among us, by the old and the young, by the large and small and with varying abilities. We can’t make everything universal for everybody all the time. But we can have that as our goal. And, so, you know, that’s another thing that we have to work at. And the final thing that it has to be as beautiful. It either has to be invisible or beautiful. You don’t even know it. You know, you walk in and you’re working at the sink and you realize that this is really comfortable. Ah, it’s a better height for me. It’s a flexible height. And now I’ve got it at my height. It’s that A-ha thing. So invisible is good or beautiful. It’s not a grab bar that makes me feel like I’m in an institution. It’s a beautiful decorative element. And Oh, by the way, if I start to slip and fall, I’ve got something to hold onto. Or if I need a little balance as I move through this space.

Kelly: (06:55)
That’s amazing. And I haven’t actually thought about that. And probably people more involved in the circle think about this a lot, but, and maybe this is my engineering background, but I hadn’t thought about the beauty component of it, the aesthetic component of it. And so that’s a really interesting piece to bring in that we don’t only want to do as minimal as possible to do the ADA compliance. We have to integrate it in a way that’s beautiful and, and compelling.

Mary Jo: (07:26)
And that sort of speaks to health and wellness because it speaks to the fact that it isn’t just our physical being that needs to be cared for, but it’s our emotional and our spiritual wellbeing. And if we create, especially in our homes, if we create a space that is a comfort to us, it needs to be attractive. It needs to say who we are and and that you know, contributes to our health on all levels. I think that another thing that universal design has to be is smart, and there are some great examples in small products. You know, it’s just thinking through what are the core different people who would use this and what can we do that would make this product or space work a little bit better. One example is the ketchup bottles now that are upside down, the labels on so that you keep it upside. If we can get used to it, if we can just believe that it’s not going to leak, it works much better. You know, or Oxo Good Grips has that Measuring Cup for liquids, and the measures are marked on an angle so you can stand up and look at it. You don’t have to bend over to look at it. So you know, those are examples of somebody was really clever there. And that’s really what we need to do.

Kelly: (08:41)
That’s actually interesting cause I was listening to, I think a ted talk on universal design and they mentioned the disability, we don’t have to focus on it being a lack of ability, but we can focus on it as being the cause for innovation. So like you said, maybe someone who doesn’t have a hard time bending over wouldn’t innovate and think about creating a measuring cup that you don’t have to bend over. But now when that is a real challenge for you, you’re incentivized to do it and it actually helps everybody.

Mary Jo: (09:15)
Thats exactly right and I’ll give you a another example. When I started in this business focusing on universal design 30 years ago, I worked with one of our major appliance companies and I said, we really need to do front loading, front control washers and dryers, like the commercial ones, and elevate them. So the idea was that a person who used a wheelchair would be able to roll up under that door and be able to access both the controls. And the appliance. No, no, no, we’ll never do that. It costs too much money, whatever. Now look, today we have on pedestals, front loading, front control washers and dryers. And the reason is that that’s sort of an interesting thing about how access moves into being universal design. The initial reason can be something that has to do with a particular disability, but we find out that it’s that A-ha again, we find out that Oh gee, this just really actually better for everybody. And that’s a wonderful part of this. You know, working with clients, private clients, sometimes they are my best resource for ideas. I know the parts and pieces that can go into this space, but they know the need that they have and what they’ve done, sort of Jerry rigged to make something work and then we can make it more beautiful and more integrated.

Kelly: (10:34)
Right, right. Working together with the entire team you can create something better. Yeah. And we talked a little bit about this, what are some examples, maybe more specific examples. I know it’s a different design approach. So maybe there are different examples from different projects, but that people can kind of use to wrap their head around what this really means when you’re looking at it from a universal design perspective.

Mary Jo: (11:01)
So if we start outside, you know, all of my experience really with very little exception is around the home single or multifamily home design. So if we start outside and the approach and entry to a home, we have to think about clearance and we need to think about the level of things- that sloped walkways is one of my favorite examples. You know, we typically have a couple of steps up to the front of a house, whether it’s a porch or an entry. And sometimes that there’s a reason for that. That has to do with climate as well. Sometimes there are code issues that have to be dealt with in order to be able to make that a level entry, find a way to make a level entry. But so, so we need to look at level entry at least one level entry into a space.

Kelly: (11:53)
And that’s actually interesting. We’ve looked at that too, from accessibility versus passive house compliance, because making it level but also making it energy efficient and making sure you have a thermal barrier can be an issue. So thinking about all aspects.

Mary Jo: (12:05)
Exactly and new products have been created to help make that thermal barrier. So it’s much easier today than it once was. But this is a perfect example of how universal design is really a thought process. It’s not one answer. So thought process here. If we have a space, if we’re working in Alaska, I’ll just tell you this, you can cut it out later, but Peter Stratton and I did a program, teaching native American housing authorities how to house their elders. So I talked about about universal design and how to incorporate it nicely into the home. And he talked about compliance and one of the things in order to comply with for government funded housing was that you had to have a level entry and these native American housing authorities are nodding and being polite and then at the break we’re talking and they said, you know here in Alaska in the winter we get standing 13 feet of snow. So most of our houses have to be on stilts because otherwise you can’t get into it. So you know you have to work with each space. But with that in mind, in a less extreme example, if we’re looking for that level entry and we’re trying to comply with passive house and efficiency requirements, maybe the level entry is the one that’s inside the garage. Maybe it’s the one that the family uses all the time. It’s not the second. It’s not to say if you need a level entry you have to go to the back door. That’s not the purpose. The purpose is, the one that you use the most is the one that gets the level entry and that way it’s covered. So you know, there are ways to deal with it. And that’s that thinking process. So we got stuck on that, but so outside we need to have clearances, we need to think about level path passageways to the things that we enjoy outside. How do you get to the barbecue, how do you get to the mailbox? How do you take the garbage out? How do you read the meter? All those kinds of things. You know, how do we create it comfortable, not just level, but what’s the surface. So a few things outside. I think that how we inform people on the outside of a house is, what kind of lighting we have around the entry, how big is the number that says what number the houses are. You know, things like that. So having a package drop outside of a house so that if I have to stop to unlock a door, if I don’t have some kind of a smart door and I have to actually unlock it, there is a place to set things down so I can do it. So those kinds of things outside. I think when you come inside in general, that level in clearances I look always to see if I can cut down on a plan. If I’m looking to incorporate more universal design in a plan, I look to see if I can eliminate as many hallways as possible, make them passage through a room as opposed to a hallway because it’s much easier to move and turn. Regardless of, or with respect for whatever mobility aids I might be using, however much space I take up, it’s easier for me to do what I need to do.

Kelly: (15:20)
And it’s interesting, the open plan concept is very popular now. And I guess everyone else is getting on board with, Oh, this is actually better.

Mary Jo: (15:28)
When I started, so 8 million years ago real estate agents used to call me and say, do you know of any homes that have been designed with an open plan? Because I know you pay attention to access and I have a client who is looking for that, so now and today it is every house. There are so many examples of that, but that is, that’s a good one. I think that another thing that I look for in a home is how many places can I eliminate a right angle turn? So we come to the end of the hallway and there’s a doorway to a bedroom and a bedroom. Maybe we angle that so that it’s not a 90 degree turn, but a 45 degree turn because that makes a much easier passage if I have any challenges in terms of mobility and balance, it’s just easier to manage. We have to look at the width of doorways and the amount of space. These are all the same things that will come up when you’re talking about accessibility. But the beauty of talking about universal design is that we’re doing it not just to comply, but we’re doing what is the best for the space. And you know, maybe in the entry to a bathroom, maybe the best for that particular master bathroom in a master suite is that we don’t have a door there, you know, or that we have a sliding door or barn door hardware, because that maintains the integrity of the wall for the support in the bathroom. You know, it’s a thinking process. Universal design is totally about thinking.

Kelly: (16:57)
So what comes up for me actually with that example and an interesting thought in comparison to other spaces right now, is that accessibility is kind of a prescriptive based requirements. And whereas universal design is more performance, how does it feel once you get in there?

Mary Jo: (17:18)
There are a number of people who have created universal design standards/programs so that you can earn a good housekeeping seal of approval. I won’t name any of the programs that are doing this, but so if you comply with these things. But what are those things? Because they’re really performance based. How do you measure? Well sometimes on a hill it’s really not worth it. And sometimes it’s more important than you just add some kind of a lifter or elevator, but you’d make that attractive.

Kelly: (18:05)
Theres an analogy here I think to where the sustainability standards are going across the country, but also in the codes, right? Everybody, it seems like, we’re trying to move away from prescriptive and get a little more towards performance.

Mary Jo: (18:25)
That’s right. Yeah. And I think it’s such a good thing because it allows us to make the best decision given the parameters of a job. The budget, the budget of space, the people who are either targeted to live there or who are the known clients. You know, so I love that we can work towards that performance space. That’s a good thing.

Kelly: (18:45)
Great. Any more good examples?

Mary Jo: (18:46)
You know, we can go into the kitchen and bathroom and I could talk for days. So in the bathroom, in the toileting area, one of the beautiful things that we have today is an advanced design of the toilet. Yes I know nobody ever wants to talk about the toilet and I get to talk about it all the time. I know that my Irish grandmother turns over in her grave every time I say toilet out loud to you know, a group of people. But, but here we are talking about the toilet. Yeah. So we haven’t even mentioned the term aging in place, but aging in place is a very popular term and it’s helping advance the cause of universal design, mainly because of the boomers, the number of people in the age boom.

Kelly: (19:44)
Yeah. I think you talked about this in your book, right? That now we have to really be thinking about this or now it’s on more people’s minds when they’re buying or renovating.

Mary Jo: (19:54)
Yeah. And that helps. That helps drive the cause. It’s better for everyone. So in terms of aging in place, one of the features of the toilet today is a washlet or a bidet system that can be built into the toilet. And while some of us may think of that as a more European approach and something that’s kind of a luxury or a convenience. As we age, that can become an essential aspect of life. And that sometimes is true of a lot of things in universal design. We add accessories in a kitchen cabinet to make it easier to reach things. Well today it makes it easier a time may come when I’m not able to bend. So it makes it possible. It becomes essential. So the bidet system built into the toilet- Great idea. Universal design maybe won’t include a bidet system on everybody’s toilet, but an outlet in that area or grounded outlet would provide for the addition of that later. And that’s really good universal design too. A wall hung toilet is another thing, I can put it at whatever height, it saves clear floor space in all the post World War Two, five by eight bathrooms that were redesigned. In your new home, probably you have one of those. And given the age of your home, probably you do. And so we’re looking for some clearance in a very tight space. That wall hung toilet will give us back maybe five inches of clearance across the room, which is huge, and it’s easier to clean around. It’s also easier, again, as I advanced in aging, if I can tuck my feet under myself to stand up, as opposed to having to have my feet out in front of me, and with that wall hung toilet, I can get my feet underneath that toilet bowl and stand up more easily. So lots of reasons why that can work. Well, actually sometimes people want to talk about the cost. Is it more expensive to do things that are universal design? If it’s a new space, it’s not more expensive, doesn’t have to be more expensive. But if we were renovating, that wall hung toilet might bring an added cost because we’d be looking to move a waist-line and that’s a pretty big ticket item. But in a new space, adding a bathroom is a wonderful thing to consider. Then we could go into the tub/shower area, and the most beautiful thing to talk about there today is the linear drains and the north threshold showers. I used to say that if I could get all of my production builders in the southwest, they had huge tiled showers, huge, but they would never give up the threshold. And I finally got them to give up the threshold. Then they did a step down because they want to contain the water, and we do have to contain water. But now with the creation of attractive linear drains, people are doing no threshold showers. It’s great from the vantage point of aesthetics because it means I can maintain the same flooring throughout small space looks great. It makes the space much more open,but it also is of course, wonderful for clear floor space and maneuvering in terms of mobility issues.

Kelly: (23:09)
Yeah. My grandfather was in a wheelchair actually, now that you’re mentioning it, and my parents redid their house years ago and wanted to make sure that it would be accessible for him and we had a roll-in no threshold shower and we actually had an elevator in the house to the second floor to make sure that he would be able to live there and age there.

Mary Jo: (23:30)
That’s beautiful. It’s an expensive proposition to do it the way they did it. So that’s why if we’re thinking in terms of universal design, every time something changed, you’d look to see how much can I incorporate better access, improved access and flexibility every time, or in new construction, what can I do from the onset, so that it doesn’t cost as much. I think also, you know, you mentioned sustainability and of course this is a major focus of our lives and if we can incorporate universal design when we build or renovate, it means that that home will not have to be renovated again as much because we will have prepared for the changes that occur in the life of the house.

Kelly: (24:16)
Right. I love that. And we talked a little bit about the kitchen renovations and reusing cabinets from before, which I love that idea. And why not create a space where you don’t have to Redo every five years or as you age or as your life changes, as you have kids, as you get pregnant, whatever.

Mary Jo: (24:38)
That’s right. Well, so we started talking about the kitchen. Maybe I should move to the kitchen with a few things. We kind of skipped the vanity area, but we did some things on the bathroom. So in the kitchen, one of the things that people don’t always think of, but it is a great universal design thinking process approaching the kitchen, is the heights of things, not just the heights of work surfaces and storage, but also the heights of appliances. You know, traditional multiple ovens in a kitchen, or an oven in a microwave or an oven and a steam oven would be stacked, a tall cabinet. And today we see sort of mid height cabinets with those appliances being designed to fit across. So it creates that strong horizontal line that’s good in design, but it also puts all those appliances at a comfort height. For most people you can choose the height, you know? So thinking about non traditional heights of traditional items in the kitchen is I think one of the less obvious things that goes a long way into making life easier. And if you don’t think so, I want you to think about it the next time Thanksgiving hits and you’re taking the Turkey out of the oven at your age.

Kelly: (25:50)
My cousin actually has a microwave that is so high up you have to get on the stool every time you go in there and whatever you get out is probably piping hot. So it’s also dangerous for kids and regular adults as well.

Mary Jo: (26:07)
Well and who uses the microwave the most? Its kids, right? So it’s one of my arguments against the over the range microwave. I know it’s great when you can save space and when you have to save space, but for those of us who aren’t super tall pulling something that might be liquid out and towards me, there’s a definitely a safety risk there.

Kelly: (26:28)
Right. It’s a good thing to avoid and fun fact: they’re not as good at exhausting the air when you use that for your exhaust. So we actually have a separate episode that’ll, that’ll come out at some point about that.

Mary Jo: (26:40)
Well good, the kitchen is a big space to talk about that.

Kelly: (26:44)
Right, right. And that has to do with healthy homes and making sure we’re not creating more disabilities by having people live in the spaces that we’re creating, as as designers and as consultants.

Mary Jo: (26:55)
That’s right. Exactly right. So in the kitchen, we talked about heights of things, also heights of work surface, you know in an ideal world, work surfaces might be adjustable in height and occasionally that is done especially where there is a work center, a cooktop or a sink. But more often, especially in the size of kitchens today, we’ll find a way to have different heights at different places in the kitchen. So the tall person is more comfortable working over here. A shorter person might be more, or a seated person might be more comfortable over there. And if we were ever going to double up on anything, the thing that people most often will have two have of in the kitchen is the sink, right? Because that creates two full work centers. As long as there’s water and a surface next to it and some storage. And sometimes that works out to be the cooking center over here, or the prep center, and over here it’s the cleanup and table setting and all that, so it is great for the function in general of the kitchen, but it also is flexible for the different sizes, shapes, abilities of people. I think lighting is something we haven’t talked about in both rooms. There’s been so many advances in lighting that it becomes a great aspect of universal design. You know, we can take a tiny strip of L.E.D. Lighting now and put it absolutely anywhere

Kelly: (28:16)
Or everywhere!

Mary Jo: (28:21)
Right and so its wonderful that we can eliminate shadows in our functional areas, kitchen and bathroom, both being high function areas. It’s also important to have adjustability in that lighting. You know, if I’m cleaning the room, I’m going to turn all the lights up so that I can scrub and see the corners and whatever. If I’m trying to have an intimate dinner, I’m going to turn the turn the lights down. So it’s nice just in general, but it’s also, there are conditions that are common to us as we age. And if we can adjust the lighting in the right ways, we can reduce the impact of those conditions. So adjustability is good too.

Kelly: (28:58)
Great points, do you have any more good examples?

Mary Jo: (29:04)
We haven’t said much about technology, and there’s so much happening in technology that really speaks to universal design. It is the story of, it’s a convenience or you’ll say, oh, isn’t it ridiculous? Look what you can do. But the day can come when it’s no longer so over the top, it’s more essential. Things that have to do with controlling appliances, you know, almost all our appliances now can be connected. And when they’re connected, that creates the possibility of a remote control, even just in your telephone, you know, so I can, through my telephone, know what’s in my refrigerator. I can pass that along to one of my shopping services, and the groceries can be delivered, so when I get home at night, it’s all done. But if I’m not able to get around as much, those things become all the more imperative. And the good example of that is the venting over a cooktop. You know, even for an average height person, you know, we have to reach high to reach the hood. If I’m a seated person or a shorter person, I can’t reach it. So that was the first place where we saw those remote controls built in or no, of course in our phones.

Kelly: (30:18)
Right. Those are great points. And I think the technology piece is interesting, bringing me back to a previous episode, I joked about having the refrigerator walk to the store for you.

Mary Jo: (30:33)
It practically does, we have the option.

Kelly: (30:38)
Yeah, and it never occurred to me to think about it this way, but thinking about it from a health perspective, if you can make it more convenient for you to get those kinds of groceries that are healthier, but it’s not out of your way. Or maybe you don’t get home until late and only the corner store is open. If you can have something that gets delivered, but it can be a healthier option, maybe that could actually improve things. I’m not sure if that statistically is what’s happening with this

Mary Jo: (31:09)
So I have a good friend who is a naturopath and she focuses on all the ways that we can enhance the eating experience, and improve the healthy aspect of what we do and eat. And that’s one of the things that she mentions that if a person can plan ahead it’s much more likely that they will eat healthy. And that allows that, without taking quite as much time. So I think it does make a difference. I think sitting just like the way you and I are around the corner from each other is another social aspect of eating. So our long island with all the seats on the back of the island, maybe if we could wrap those seats around the corners, it’s a design concept that just makes it a little bit more of a social experience. It’s a good idea for health in general, it becomes much more of an imperative as we age because we isolate, you know, and we can lose interest in healthy food or food at all.

Kelly: (32:03)
Actually I was just listening to something about technology and the impact of technology on social interaction. And they were saying that millennials are having issues with social interaction in the workplace because they’re so used to just being on their phones.

Mary Jo: (32:18)
Absolutely, you know, sitting next to each other texting instead of talking. I think about that how we were talking about, WeWork earlier and the WeLive concept. One of the beauties of it, it’s an instant social network for people. You know, you go into the communal center, you can bring your computer or you can sit and talk, but you have instant community.

Kelly: (32:40)
And they’re very conscious about creating space, and some offices are like this too, but creating spaces to channel people together into central locations.

Mary Jo: (32:50)
I think it’s why it’s so popular with millennials because it makes it easier.

Kelly: (32:55)
Yeah. So as we’re sort of getting towards the end of our time here, is there one key takeaway that you think we should all leave this conversation with?

Mary Jo: (33:07)
Well, if I had to take one concept, one thought and send it forward. If people changed the way they do things in one way from our conversation it would be to understand that universal design is a goal and a way of thinking, not a prescriptive list of details that need to be done, but an approach to design. And it should be part of everything we do.

Kelly: (33:33)
That’s great. And the last thing that I like to ask people or that we like to ask people on this is when we have you back on the podcast in five years, what do you think we will be talking about then?

Mary Jo: (33:47)
I think that one of the things we’ll talk about is technology and how much it has impacted the way we live. I’ll give you an example. Our aging boomers, a group that I belong to, and I’m happy to belong to, but as we age, you know, everything that has a chip in it can be a monitor as well. And so integrative health and the ability of our homes to help support us and maintain us as we advance in that aging process, I think that’s going to be a significant part of what’s going on in the world. So it’ll be interesting to watch.

Kelly: (34:25)
That’s a great idea. And you were just talking to me before we started recording about a robot that makes your home healthier without you even having to flip any switches. You don’t have to control it remotely or at all.

Mary Jo: (34:38)
He’s thinking for us. Right. That’s a little spooky, all of this is a little spooky. You know, on the one side I want my privacy, I want my control. But on the other side when it comes to home health, would I rather have a person hanging out at my house with me or you know, monitors that can let somebody know if I’m in trouble? Right. So it’ll change how we live.

Kelly: (34:58)
Yeah. Well I think that is very a great statement or sentiment to end on. Hopefully on the better side of that. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Speaker 4: (35:20)
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 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.

John Balfe, Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships (NEEP)

John works on the Buildings Team at NEEP to help drive energy efficiency in new and retrofitted schools and public buildings throughout the region. John works with the various stakeholders in the industry to advance public policy with high-performance building standards in the region, including facilitation of information exchange and knowledge transfer between states and programs. Prior to joining NEEP in 2015, John interned at the Southern New Hampshire Planning Commission located in Manchester, NH. He graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 2014 with a BS in Community and Environmental Planning.

Air quality, acoustics, and thermal comfort are just some of the critical elements to consider when assessing the indoor environmental quality of a building. But how are these characteristics measured in schools, and what programs do we have to ensure they are being prioritized?

Joining us for this episode is John Balfe from Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships (NEEP). John discusses the key components to a high-performance school, as well as the programs and standards that are being implemented to help ensure the development of healthy academic environments.

NE-CHPS v3.2

CAPEE (Community Action Planning for Energy Efficiency)

NEEP’s High Performance Schools Webpage

NEEP Newsletter

Blog: SWA’s Top 10 Tips for a Healthier Indoor Environment

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: (00:14)
by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Robb: (00:18)
I’m Rob Aldrich

New Speaker: (00:19)
and I’m Kelly Westby.

New Speaker: (00:21)
This week I talked with John Balfe from NEEP- Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships, and John works a lot with school buildings, high performance schools. There’s an organization called CHPS C-H-P-S collaborative for high performance schools, which offers guidance and also certification for schools all over the country. And NEEP, John’s organization, manages the northeast regional version of CHPS, for folks in the northeast and the mid-Atlantic. I do want to say that the website CHPS.net Is the proper website. A couple of times in the episode, I think I say chps.org. That is incorrect. It’s all correct in the show notes. So here’s an interview with John Balfe.

Robb: (01:12)
All right. High performance schools. First of all, did you go to a high performance school?

John: (01:18)
I did not. Well, my high school was decent, but it wasn’t built to any criteria. My old elementary school recently got knocked down and renovated and it is now a high performance school, it’s a CHP school. So it was kind of cool to see. And I actually went back and did a case study on it. So that was kind of cool.

Robb: (01:38)
Cool, where was it?

John: (01:38)
It in Middleton, Massachusetts. Yeah, it’s a lot better than when I went there, that’s for sure.

Robb: (01:45)
Yeah, I was thinking about that when we are kind of prepping for this call, I was thinking back on my school and it was, you know, I think it was built in the fifties or something, it was before I was born. And the one thing I remember when I was thinking about it, it was just the heat. You know, if you go back to school in September, you can get a heat wave in September. This was also in Massachusetts and I remember it just being stifling in classrooms. That’s not a good place to learn. So when we’re talking about high performance schools, the first thing that comes to mind, for me, is indoor air quality. Is that a big pillar of CHPs and of these programs?

John: (02:27)
Yeah, I think indoor air quality, and we kind of even broaden it a little bit further than that to the indoor environmental quality, so things like acoustics, air quality, thermal comfort of the building are kind of the key components of indoor environmental quality. There all really important because, you know, if a student’s sitting in the back of the class and the HVAC equipment comes on and it’s really loud and distracting, you know, that kid in the back of the class might not be hearing what the teacher is saying. And that can be really difficult. You know, not a great learning environment. I like to always say that there’s three main pillars, energy efficiency and environmental stewardship, really. So, you know, it’s an energy efficient building and reduces the impact on the environment around us. So to me, those are the big, the big three things that high performance schools have in common.

Robb: (03:25)
Gotcha. Efficiency, indoor environmental quality, not just air indoor air quality and environmental impact. Local locally and globally thinking small and big?

John: (03:35)
Yeah. I think as much as possible in the chp’s criteria, you can get points for locally sourced materials, and citing your school building in a proper way. I think it has local impact for sure, but, you know, we’re all in this together, so it’s kind of a global impact as well.

Robb: (03:59)
Awesome. And there are plenty of high performance building programs, green building programs. What is different? CHPs is very specific to schools. What are the big challenges or what’s different about schools that CHPs addresses?

John: (04:20)
Yeah, I’m glad you said that. CHPs is designed just for schools. LEED has a few different building types that it works in and really is focused on kind of community wide stuff, which is, you know, super important. But schools where the focus of chps from the beginning, and northeast chips, which is the criteria that I’ll probably be referencing throughout the talk today, that was built with input from a lot of regional stakeholders here in the northeast region. Facility directors, school business officials, architects and engineers, so it was really a collaborative effort to, to build this criteria with, you know, what’s really important here in the northeast. So I think there’s regional adaptations of the CHPs criteria, Northeast chps being one of them. So, I think that’s a little bit different of a twist from maybe some other criteria that are out there. And what’s different about schools? I think we all know how important schools are. You know, it could be the reason that folks move to a town, if there’s a really good school system, you know, we often say they’re the center of the community. And I think that’s so true now more than ever, with some of their resiliency discussions coming into play, they’re being used as community centers more and more. And so often we’re seeing a new school being built and that school is being used for many other things besides just kind of the educational component of it. Obviously that’s the main focus, but there’s stuff going on during the summer at the schools and maybe there’s stuff going on in the morning before school or afternoon activities, whether that’s sports or camps or, you know, feeding the hungry in that community. You know, we’re seeing that happen a lot. So I think that’s kind of what’s different about schools. You know, they’re just the center of the community and they’re used for a lot more than education. And I actually wrote a blog on this not too long ago that highlighted that students spend over, I think it was 15,000, maybe close to 16,000 hours over their life in a school building. So it’s, you know, a place where students are spending a ton of time, and having an important focus in these environments, I think just makes good sense. And you know, over the long run can save the community a lot, a lot of money if we’re focusing on high performance.

Robb: (06:55)
No arguments. So interesting. So like LEED can have a LEED restaurant. A restaurant is used as a restaurant all the time, but where schools are, like you said, they’re going to be, you know, used during the school day and then after hours, other groups, other town groups coming in, often town meetings, elections, the weekends you have all kinds of different stuff going on. And the CHPs criteria has specific methods or credits to kind of encourage you to address these different uses. Did I hear you correctly there?

John: (07:33)
Yeah that’s, that’s exactly right. There are a few different ways that either the community gets involved in the upfront design of the school building, but there’s also particular credits in northeast chps and probably all the other adaptations of chips as well. They give you points for, you know, joint use of facilities I think is what it’s called in northeast chps. So having plans in place to allow for the greater community to either rent out the different spaces, whether that’s the auditorium, the cafeteria, just a particular classroom or some of the fields out in the athletic yard. So there’s different plans that you can have in place to make these kind of transactions or allowing the community to use them pretty easily. And you know, some schools may charge community for those uses. Some may not. You know, it might depend on if you’re a nonprofit or a for profit. They might charge different rates there, but we’re also seeing that it’s a great way for some schools if they are charging to get a little bit extra money that way. So it’s something I don’t think everyone thinks about when they’re building a school, but, you know, it’s something the community is really invested in it and kind of wants to show off and this is one of the great things about chps is kind of gets you thinking about how your school can be used by others as well.

Robb: (09:02)
Cool. Yeah, that’s pretty neat. That’s something that I hadn’t, I hadn’t thought about discreetly, not in that way.

John: (09:08)
Yeah. And sometimes it can be a bit of a challenge because you don’t necessarily factor in that the school is going to be used a lot more than just regular school hours. So you know, things like energy modeling, just taking that into account is really important so that you can have accurate models and really try to understand, you know, how much the school will actually be used. So it’s things like that that we’re trying to share those stories with folks that are going through the process and make sure that they’re aware of it if that’s kind of the route they want to go down.

Robb: (09:44)
How about new technologies or systems? Or maybe not new, but stuff you’re seeing more and more? I mean, personally I see lots more PV on schools everywhere. Kind of great high visibility place for solar and a tool to teach kids about solar. But are there other kinds of different lighting technologies or ventilation approaches or are there any kind of new technological trends you guys see in chp’s schools?

John: (10:14)
Yeah, I think definitely we’re seeing a lot of renewable energies, probably solar being the biggest one in schools. And like you said, it’s definitely an opportunity to kind of teach students about what renewable energies are. But also on the energy efficiency side of things. You know, there are ways to kind of integrate that into the curriculum as well. So in a lot of the schools I have toured, and you know, just been in I guess over the past couple of years, LED lights are obviously very common, controlling of those lights. Some schools will have some really good day lighting features. So there’ll be sensors in classrooms that will dim the lights automatically when enough sunlight is being introduced into that room. And conversely, if you know, there’s not enough natural daylight coming in, then the lights will brighten. So it’s kind of smart control, smart building type features that we’re seeing in a lot of other building types are now going into schools too, which is pretty cool.

Robb: (11:17)
Let me stop you for a second, but are there actually credits in the CHPs programs for incorporating high performance features as part of the curriculum for students? Is that strongly encouraged?

John: (11:33)
Yes, there is a whole section and we often reference it or talk about it as kind of using the school as a teaching tool. But yeah, integrating that into the curriculum, it gets you some extra credits in CHPs and there are a lot of good other organizations that kind of focus specifically on working the building into the curriculum, so there are a lot of good case studies and you know, things that you can follow out there. But yeah it’s certainly built into the chps criteria as well.

Robb: (12:03)
Nice. That’s very cool. Yeah, I think it’s a great opportunity to kind of just engage and educate students. I’ve been in a few schools where the design team will really accentuate or highlight the HVAC equipment in a building. Like, you know, the ducts and things like that, they’ll really try to paint them, you know, unique colors and bright and vibrant so that they kind of piques the interest of students and then, you know, maybe gets them asking questions about that. And getting that conversation started, so that’s pretty cool. And, you know, it just makes for kind of a nice environment with those, those types of colors. But that’s Kind of one unique way. Another technology that I’ve seen in a couple of schools now you know, with technology just changing so much, textbooks aren’t as prevalent in schools and libraries are a little bit different than they used to be. When I went to school, we were seeing a lot of students with iPads or laptops owned by the school district potentially. So one thing that I’ve seen a couple of times are laptop carts or device carts that are used for charging the equipment at the end of the day or you know, whenever it runs out of battery life. But basically, these laptops or iPads or whatever they might be, are stored in a closet. And there’s this electric supply to the cart, and once all the iPads are done charging, the electricity just kind of shuts off there. So you’re not plugging in individual iPads or laptops in classrooms, you know, all over the place in the school anymore, which is nice to see. And you’re not seeing kind of those phantom loads that are just draining a small amount of energy throughout the night.

John: (13:59)
But collectively with all the iPads and all the laptops over the course of a year that that can amount to a lot of energy. So things like these laptop carts are pretty cool that we’re seeing that kind of help to navigate that issue I guess.

Robb: (14:13)
Yeah, it’s interesting. I was at a meeting recently, this is related to schools, but they recently reset the benchmarks for commercial buildings for energy star through the portfolio manager tool. So the benchmark for schools, one of the big challenges was computers from the last time they set the benchmark, I don’t know if it was six years ago or 10 years ago, but you know, they used to have this energy allotment for computers in schools and you know, a school might have a few dozen computers. Now they have hundreds and hundreds of computers and they’re much more efficient, but they’re so much more prevalent. It’s an interesting challenge and just an interesting exercise to see how these energy usage patterns change.

John: (15:06)
I think plug loads, you know, just in general or you know, through the roof and a lot of these, these types of facilities, you know, people plugging in and charging their devices. Maybe that happens less so in schools, but laptops and iPads for sure that’s huge in schools. And then whatever the teachers might be bringing into the school as well, you know coffee pots or mini fridges, those sorts of things. So managing all that I think, you know, with some of the technology we have today is probably a lot easier than it was. And one other last kind of technology that I’m seeing a lot, and this is more on the student educational side of things, are building energy dashboards. So a big monitor right when you come in the school or in a kind of high visibility place that get students interested in how much energy. Maybe it only impacts a few students here and there, but I think, you know, it gets people thinking about how much energy they’re using and sometimes those can display tips for reducing energy. So we’re seeing that pop up in a lot of building types, but especially schools where, you know, there’s that educational component as well.

Robb: (16:20)
Excellent. Excellent. So the programs themselves, I know you can go online to the chps website, chps.org, and you can sign up for a free account and download all the info. Does NEEP have similar website for the northeast?

John: (16:38)
Yes. So neep.org is our website. And we have a ton of good resources and case studies on high performance schools. And that’s where actually the northeast chips criteria lives. So that’s pretty easy to navigate if you go to our school’s page. And all our resources are free to use, and they are meant for the northeast and mid-Atlantic states. So we work everywhere in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, down to DC, Delaware, and West Virginia now as well. So they’re specific to those states.

Robb: (17:19)
So that all that info is there and free to use. If somebody wants to go through the process of certification, how does that work and who was it that actually decides to sign up? Is it the designer, is it the school board? How does the process work for getting certified?

John: (17:38)
Yeah, that’s a good question. And it’ll depend, I guess on the state and the community. You know, who actually kind of pushes for chps. You know, sometimes we’ll see a school board member will be really familiar with northeast chips and they will want to really push for that. Sometimes it’s the architect or the engineer bringing it to the community saying that these things are achievable and we should be looking at that. Usually it’s the architects or the design team, I guess I should say, kind of going through the process and, you know, doing all the paperwork and making sure that the credits line up and that sort of thing and submit in documentation. But it really can depend on who’s pushing for it. We always try to get some language in the RFPs when a community is going out to bid for a school project. We try to get language in there about targeting a low energy building or specifically northeast chps. So it can definitely depend just kind of where the process is taking place. On the CHPs side of things, it again, will depend on the state because, you know, in Rhode Island, they do in house reviews of all the documentation that comes in. So they actually have the school building authority there in Rhode Island that reviews all the forms that were filled out. And then they’re the ones that actually, you know, say that yes, you met the chps criteria or no you didn’t because of these reasons and you know, this is what you can do next. In other states it’s submitted directly to chps, the organization itself, and they have reviewers on staff that, you know, go through all this paperwork and figure out whether you met the criteria or not. So, you know, kind of depends. There are different rules in different states, I guess.

Robb: (19:35)
Earlier is better in any kind of design process to make sure you get the details right, I’m sure. I mean, you don’t want to be ready to start construction and then, hey, let’s make this high performance. I’m sure that this is even more the case for schools and then some other buildings.

Speaker 3: (19:53)
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think these projects sometimes take years and years. So the earlier you can get in and the more planning you can get done, and just kind of the more information that you can gather as a community or as a design team on, you know, how to accomplish these goals. The earlier the better for sure. We try to tell that to all our communities. And you know, a big piece of this is engaging with your local utilities. And that’s actually one of the prerequisites in northeast chps is, you know, making sure you’re working with utilities and getting the technical assistance in the financial incentives that they might have available to you. So that of course has to happen early on as well. So we’re always trying to push for schools to think about these things early and get the process started as soon as they can.

Robb: (20:37)
So what’s the result? I mean, we mentioned earlier that, you know, good indoor environmental quality is great. It makes sense to want that in schools, but are there meaningful studies that show that, “hey, kids learn better, they actually do better” have people looked into that?

John: (20:57)
Yeah, there are definitely a bunch of good studies out there. There’s a lot of like anecdotal evidence from maybe one particular school that’s seen reduced absentee rates since they opened up a high-performance school. And, you know, one example I can share is the Concord school district in New Hampshire. They actually saw a pretty significant absentee rate reduction, and they opened up a few new high-performance schools back between 2010 and 2013, somewhere in that range. And they saw those reductions. So, you know, there’s a lot of things like that, but there are definitely some more kind of scientific formal studies out there. The Harvard, T.H. Chan School of Public Health is doing a lot of great work in this area right now. They have a couple of publications out there already that, you know, talk really in-depth about how the indoor environment impacts student thinking and health and test scores. So there’s certainly a lot of good information out there. The EPA actually has a lot of good resources on this as well. I think they have a whole webpage kind of dedicated to high performance schools. I’m not sure the exact title of that webpage, but you know, EPA and schools.

Robb: (22:16)
Yeah, that’s cool. We can dig it up and we’ll put it on the show notes page as well as the link to the Harvard studies you said. And do you have cool case studies?

John: (22:30)
Yeah, we have a number of them on our websites. You know, I’ve done a bunch in the past few years. But yeah, we’re always looking to add to them too. So, you know, if you are ever working on a high performance school and want to create a case study I’m happy to work with whoever on that as well.

Robb: (22:46)
Cool. How, how about existing schools? I mean we’ve been talking about new construction so far, but does chps or NEEP get into programs/methods to improve existing schools?

John: (23:00)
Yeah. So you can use northeast chps for new construction, for major renovation projects, or kind of in a phased approach. So, if you’re just kind of doing capital improvement projects here and there, over time you can actually become, chps verified. But the existing stock is obviously much larger than, you know, new construction buildings, so that’s a super important thing to be targeting on the NEEP side of things. We do a lot of work with facility directors. You know, we have a lot of strong connections with facility directors throughout the region. And we’re trying to help them understand what they can be doing to improve the efficiency of their buildings. We have this guide called the regional operations and maintenance guide for public buildings. So it goes beyond schools, but you know, a lot of it is targeted directly at schools and it provides a lot of best practices and lessons learned and kind of checklists. It’s a user friendly guide to help facility directors or others within the community really improve the efficiency of their existing building stock. So I think we have a lot of work to do as an industry as a hole on existing buildings. If we want to really improve some of the carbon emissions and our talk about climate change, you know, if we want to really improve those things, targeting the existing building stock is so important.

Robb: (24:31)
Yeah. There’s a lot of them out there. It’s a big deal. And that’s a frustration. I mean, we work with a lot of designers and developers of new buildings, and they’re much, much, much, much better. And this is everybody’s scratching their heads about what we do with the 99% of buildings out there that are old?

John: (24:51)
Exactly. And one of the things that we always say is you got to start with understanding your building’s energy use. So, going through the benchmarking process, you know, using that portfolio manager tool that you mentioned earlier, that’s really kind of where you got to start. You got to take control. It’s just like, you know, if you’re trying to get control of your finances and your personal life, you kind of budget things out. And that’s kind of how I see looking at improving the energy in existing buildings. You know, you got to dive into it and try to figure out how much energy you’re using and where’s there’s some room for improvement. So that’s really the key first step to me.

Robb: (25:29)
Yup. Fantastic point. Absolutely. I definitely agree. So what’s next? If we talk about this in five years, 10 years, any trends? Do You think that there’s some big changes happening? What ?are high performance schools going to look like? Or what the program’s going to look like down the road?

John: (25:48)
Yeah, it was interesting, I was listening to some of the earlier podcasts that you guys have produced and you know, you’re talking about zero energy buildings. and to me, I think that’s a really big one that’s being talked about really all over and in kind of small pockets of the region, these conversations are definitely happening. And depending on who you’re talking to, you know, you’ll get varying levels of, “oh yeah, that’s definitely possible at a similar budget to a regular or high performance building.” Others are a lot more skeptical and think that, you know, it costs a lot more. So, I think there’s certain tradeoffs, you know, specific to each project that can make projects a lot more if you’re targeting zero energy. But to me the important thing is really targeting a low EUI building. So just making sure that, you know, the building is conserving energy and using energy as efficiently as possible. And then tying in some of those renewable energy components into it as well. So yeah, NEEP is having these conversations across the region. I’m involved in conversations in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, so really, you know, it’s happening all over. There’s a couple of good examples down in Maryland, they had a zero energy pilot program where they selected three schools with some state funding there to get to zero energy. So I think there’s one school open now that’s, I’m not sure if it’s exactly at zero energy, but you know, I would imagine it’s pretty close if it’s not truly zero energy. And then there’s two more kind of coming online later this year. So, you know, we’re seeing more and more of these buildings pop up and I think schools are on the leading edge of this kind of zero energy movement. So, it’s really good to see, and hopefully, you know, with education kind of all-around across the market, we’ll be able to make this possible over the next five to 10 years for new construction at least.

Robb: (27:52)
Awesome. Yeah. Schools may be a hot topic with zero energy buildings because they’re high visibility. People want high performance schools for all the reasons that we’ve been talking about. And they’re often fairly large low rise buildings with lots of roof area for solar. So yeah, I think it could be a winning combination. We’ll stay tuned for more zero energy schools.

John: (28:18)
I hope so.

Robb: (28:20)
So, thanks John. Where do people go? I think we mentioned chps.org is the chps website

John: (28:28)
I think it’s actually chps.net. But no big deal. You’d probably get there either way.

Robb: (28:34)
thank you for the correction, we’ll put the right link on our website and, and NEEP is .org right?

John: (28:43)
Yup, NEEP.org. You got that right. And I’ll just throw a plug for one of our tools that really helps communities kind of figure out what they should be taking on. It’s a tool we released early last year and it’s kind of a user-friendly guide for anyone in the community to walk through and, you know, point to specific projects that they should be taking on. So it’s called community action planning for energy efficiency. So if you’re, you know, listening and trying to figure out where your communities should be, kind of thinking about energy efficiency and what to take on first from forming an energy committee to building a high performance school. There’s all this information built into this cool new tool. So I just wanted to throw that out there as a good starting point for a lot of folks. If you know they’re overwhelmed with the mass amount of information that’s out there.

Robb: (29:35)
Oh, cool. That sounds like it could be a great resource and that’s on the NEEP website and you can get to it from the NEEP website?

John: (29:42)
Yup, that’s correct.

Robb: (29:42)
And we’ll link to that directly in the show notes too. Thanks very much, John.

New Speaker: (29:55)
Thank you for listening to buildings and beyond. For more information about the topics discussed today, visit www.swinter.com/podcasts 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 [inaudible] and myself. Heather Breslin, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Air quality, acoustics, and thermal comfort are just some of the critical elements to consider when assessing the indoor environmental quality of a building. But how are these characteristics measured in schools, and what programs do we have to ensure they are being prioritized?

Joining us for this episode is John Balfe from Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships (NEEP). John discusses the key components to a high-performance school, as well as the programs and standards that are being implemented to help ensure the development of healthy academic environments.

Episode Guest: John Balfe, Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships (NEEP)

John works on the Buildings Team at NEEP to help drive energy efficiency in new and retrofitted schools and public buildings throughout the region. John works with the various stakeholders in the industry to advance public policy with high-performance building standards in the region, including facilitation of information exchange and knowledge transfer between states and programs. Prior to joining NEEP in 2015, John interned at the Southern New Hampshire Planning Commission located in Manchester, NH. He graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 2014 with a BS in Community and Environmental Planning.

NE-CHPS v3.2

CAPEE (Community Action Planning for Energy Efficiency)

NEEP’s High Performance Schools Webpage

NEEP Newsletter

Blog: SWA’s Top 10 Tips for a Healthier Indoor Environment

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

Universal Design with Mary Jo Peterson 

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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:                                  00:14                   by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Robb:                                00:18                   I’m Rob Aldrich

New Speaker:                  00:19                   and I’m Kelly Westby.

New Speaker:                  00:21                   This week I talked with John Balfe from NEEP- Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships, and John works a lot with school buildings, high performance schools. There’s an organization called CHPS C-H-P-S collaborative for high performance schools, which offers guidance and also certification for schools all over the country. And NEEP, John’s organization, manages the northeast regional version of CHPS, for folks in the northeast and the mid-Atlantic. I do want to say that the website CHPS.net Is the proper website. A couple of times in the episode, I think I say chps.org. That is incorrect. It’s all correct in the show notes. So here’s an interview with John Balfe.

Robb:                                01:12                   All right. High performance schools. First of all, did you go to a high performance school?

John:                                 01:18                   I did not. Well, my high school was decent, but it wasn’t built to any criteria. My old elementary school recently got knocked down and renovated and it is now a high performance school, it’s a CHP school. So it was kind of cool to see. And I actually went back and did a case study on it. So that was kind of cool.

Robb:                                01:38                   Cool, where was it?

John:                                 01:38                   It in Middleton, Massachusetts. Yeah, it’s a lot better than when I went there, that’s for sure.

Robb:                                01:45                   Yeah, I was thinking about that when we are kind of prepping for this call, I was thinking back on my school and it was, you know, I think it was built in the fifties or something, it was before I was born. And the one thing I remember when I was thinking about it, it was just the heat. You know, if you go back to school in September, you can get a heat wave in September. This was also in Massachusetts and I remember it just being stifling in classrooms. That’s not a good place to learn. So when we’re talking about high performance schools, the first thing that comes to mind, for me, is indoor air quality. Is that a big pillar of CHPs and of these programs?

John:                                 02:27                   Yeah, I think indoor air quality, and we kind of even broaden it a little bit further than that to the indoor environmental quality, so things like acoustics, air quality, thermal comfort of the building are kind of the key components of indoor environmental quality. There all really important because, you know, if a student’s sitting in the back of the class and the HVAC equipment comes on and it’s really loud and distracting, you know, that kid in the back of the class might not be hearing what the teacher is saying. And that can be really difficult. You know, not a great learning environment. I like to always say that there’s three main pillars, energy efficiency and environmental stewardship, really. So, you know, it’s an energy efficient building and reduces the impact on the environment around us. So to me, those are the big, the big three things that high performance schools have in common.

Robb:                                03:25                   Gotcha. Efficiency, indoor environmental quality, not just air indoor air quality and environmental impact. Local locally and globally thinking small and big?

John:                                 03:35                   Yeah. I think as much as possible in the chp’s criteria, you can get points for locally sourced materials, and citing your school building in a proper way. I think it has local impact for sure, but, you know, we’re all in this together, so it’s kind of a global impact as well.

Robb:                                03:59                   Awesome. And there are plenty of high performance building programs, green building programs. What is different? CHPs is very specific to schools. What are the big challenges or what’s different about schools that CHPs addresses?

John:                                 04:20                   Yeah, I’m glad you said that. CHPs is designed just for schools. LEED has a few different building types that it works in and really is focused on kind of community wide stuff, which is, you know, super important. But schools where the focus of chps from the beginning, and northeast chips, which is the criteria that I’ll probably be referencing throughout the talk today, that was built with input from a lot of regional stakeholders here in the northeast region. Facility directors, school business officials, architects and engineers, so it was really a collaborative effort to, to build this criteria with, you know, what’s really important here in the northeast. So I think there’s regional adaptations of the CHPs criteria, Northeast chps being one of them. So, I think that’s a little bit different of a twist from maybe some other criteria that are out there. And what’s different about schools? I think we all know how important schools are. You know, it could be the reason that folks move to a town, if there’s a really good school system, you know, we often say they’re the center of the community. And I think that’s so true now more than ever, with some of their resiliency discussions coming into play, they’re being used as community centers more and more. And so often we’re seeing a new school being built and that school is being used for many other things besides just kind of the educational component of it. Obviously that’s the main focus, but there’s stuff going on during the summer at the schools and maybe there’s stuff going on in the morning before school or afternoon activities, whether that’s sports or camps or, you know, feeding the hungry in that community. You know, we’re seeing that happen a lot. So I think that’s kind of what’s different about schools. You know, they’re just the center of the community and they’re used for a lot more than education. And I actually wrote a blog on this not too long ago that highlighted that students spend over, I think it was 15,000, maybe close to 16,000 hours over their life in a school building. So it’s, you know, a place where students are spending a ton of time, and having an important focus in these environments, I think just makes good sense. And you know, over the long run can save the community a lot, a lot of money if we’re focusing on high performance.

Robb:                                06:55                   No arguments. So interesting. So like LEED can have a LEED restaurant. A restaurant is used as a restaurant all the time, but where schools are, like you said, they’re going to be, you know, used during the school day and then after hours, other groups, other town groups coming in, often town meetings, elections, the weekends you have all kinds of different stuff going on. And the CHPs criteria has specific methods or credits to kind of encourage you to address these different uses. Did I hear you correctly there?

John:                                 07:33                   Yeah that’s, that’s exactly right. There are a few different ways that either the community gets involved in the upfront design of the school building, but there’s also particular credits in northeast chps and probably all the other adaptations of chips as well. They give you points for, you know, joint use of facilities I think is what it’s called in northeast chps. So having plans in place to allow for the greater community to either rent out the different spaces, whether that’s the auditorium, the cafeteria, just a particular classroom or some of the fields out in the athletic yard. So there’s different plans that you can have in place to make these kind of transactions or allowing the community to use them pretty easily. And you know, some schools may charge community for those uses. Some may not. You know, it might depend on if you’re a nonprofit or a for profit. They might charge different rates there, but we’re also seeing that it’s a great way for some schools if they are charging to get a little bit extra money that way. So it’s something I don’t think everyone thinks about when they’re building a school, but, you know, it’s something the community is really invested in it and kind of wants to show off and this is one of the great things about chps is kind of gets you thinking about how your school can be used by others as well.

Robb:                                09:02                   Cool. Yeah, that’s pretty neat. That’s something that I hadn’t, I hadn’t thought about discreetly, not in that way.

John:                                 09:08                   Yeah. And sometimes it can be a bit of a challenge because you don’t necessarily factor in that the school is going to be used a lot more than just regular school hours. So you know, things like energy modeling, just taking that into account is really important so that you can have accurate models and really try to understand, you know, how much the school will actually be used. So it’s things like that that we’re trying to share those stories with folks that are going through the process and make sure that they’re aware of it if that’s kind of the route they want to go down.

Robb:                                09:44                   How about new technologies or systems? Or maybe not new, but stuff you’re seeing more and more? I mean, personally I see lots more PV on schools everywhere. Kind of great high visibility place for solar and a tool to teach kids about solar. But are there other kinds of different lighting technologies or ventilation approaches or are there any kind of new technological trends you guys see in chp’s schools?

John:                                 10:14                   Yeah, I think definitely we’re seeing a lot of renewable energies, probably solar being the biggest one in schools. And like you said, it’s definitely an opportunity to kind of teach students about what renewable energies are. But also on the energy efficiency side of things. You know, there are ways to kind of integrate that into the curriculum as well. So in a lot of the schools I have toured, and you know, just been in I guess over the past couple of years, LED lights are obviously very common, controlling of those lights. Some schools will have some really good day lighting features. So there’ll be sensors in classrooms that will dim the lights automatically when enough sunlight is being introduced into that room. And conversely, if you know, there’s not enough natural daylight coming in, then the lights will brighten. So it’s kind of smart control, smart building type features that we’re seeing in a lot of other building types are now going into schools too, which is pretty cool.

Robb:                                11:17                   Let me stop you for a second, but are there actually credits in the CHPs programs for incorporating high performance features as part of the curriculum for students? Is that strongly encouraged?

John:                                 11:33                   Yes, there is a whole section and we often reference it or talk about it as kind of using the school as a teaching tool. But yeah, integrating that into the curriculum, it gets you some extra credits in CHPs and there are a lot of good other organizations that kind of focus specifically on working the building into the curriculum, so there are a lot of good case studies and you know, things that you can follow out there. But yeah it’s certainly built into the chps criteria as well.

Robb:                                12:03                   Nice. That’s very cool. Yeah, I think it’s a great opportunity to kind of just engage and educate students. I’ve been in a few schools where the design team will really accentuate or highlight the HVAC equipment in a building. Like, you know, the ducts and things like that, they’ll really try to paint them, you know, unique colors and bright and vibrant so that they kind of piques the interest of students and then, you know, maybe gets them asking questions about that. And getting that conversation started, so that’s pretty cool. And, you know, it just makes for kind of a nice environment with those, those types of colors. But that’s Kind of one unique way. Another technology that I’ve seen in a couple of schools now you know, with technology just changing so much, textbooks aren’t as prevalent in schools and libraries are a little bit different than they used to be. When I went to school, we were seeing a lot of students with iPads or laptops owned by the school district potentially. So one thing that I’ve seen a couple of times are laptop carts or device carts that are used for charging the equipment at the end of the day or you know, whenever it runs out of battery life. But basically, these laptops or iPads or whatever they might be, are stored in a closet. And there’s this electric supply to the cart, and once all the iPads are done charging, the electricity just kind of shuts off there. So you’re not plugging in individual iPads or laptops in classrooms, you know, all over the place in the school anymore, which is nice to see. And you’re not seeing kind of those phantom loads that are just draining a small amount of energy throughout the night.

John:                                 13:59                   But collectively with all the iPads and all the laptops over the course of a year that that can amount to a lot of energy. So things like these laptop carts are pretty cool that we’re seeing that kind of help to navigate that issue I guess.

Robb:                                14:13                   Yeah, it’s interesting. I was at a meeting recently, this is related to schools, but they recently reset the benchmarks for commercial buildings for energy star through the portfolio manager tool. So the benchmark for schools, one of the big challenges was computers from the last time they set the benchmark, I don’t know if it was six years ago or 10 years ago, but you know, they used to have this energy allotment for computers in schools and you know, a school might have a few dozen computers. Now they have hundreds and hundreds of computers and they’re much more efficient, but they’re so much more prevalent. It’s an interesting challenge and just an interesting exercise to see how these energy usage patterns change.

John:                                 15:06                   I think plug loads, you know, just in general or you know, through the roof and a lot of these, these types of facilities, you know, people plugging in and charging their devices. Maybe that happens less so in schools, but laptops and iPads for sure that’s huge in schools. And then whatever the teachers might be bringing into the school as well, you know coffee pots or mini fridges, those sorts of things. So managing all that I think, you know, with some of the technology we have today is probably a lot easier than it was. And one other last kind of technology that I’m seeing a lot, and this is more on the student educational side of things, are building energy dashboards. So a big monitor right when you come in the school or in a kind of high visibility place that get students interested in how much energy. Maybe it only impacts a few students here and there, but I think, you know, it gets people thinking about how much energy they’re using and sometimes those can display tips for reducing energy. So we’re seeing that pop up in a lot of building types, but especially schools where, you know, there’s that educational component as well.

Robb:                                16:20                   Excellent. Excellent. So the programs themselves, I know you can go online to the chps website, chps.org, and you can sign up for a free account and download all the info. Does NEEP have similar website for the northeast?

John:                                 16:38                   Yes. So neep.org is our website. And we have a ton of good resources and case studies on high performance schools. And that’s where actually the northeast chips criteria lives. So that’s pretty easy to navigate if you go to our school’s page. And all our resources are free to use, and they are meant for the northeast and mid-Atlantic states. So we work everywhere in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, down to DC, Delaware, and West Virginia now as well. So they’re specific to those states.

Robb:                                17:19                   So that all that info is there and free to use. If somebody wants to go through the process of certification, how does that work and who was it that actually decides to sign up? Is it the designer, is it the school board? How does the process work for getting certified?

John:                                 17:38                   Yeah, that’s a good question. And it’ll depend, I guess on the state and the community. You know, who actually kind of pushes for chps. You know, sometimes we’ll see a school board member will be really familiar with northeast chips and they will want to really push for that. Sometimes it’s the architect or the engineer bringing it to the community saying that these things are achievable and we should be looking at that. Usually it’s the architects or the design team, I guess I should say, kind of going through the process and, you know, doing all the paperwork and making sure that the credits line up and that sort of thing and submit in documentation. But it really can depend on who’s pushing for it. We always try to get some language in the RFPs when a community is going out to bid for a school project. We try to get language in there about targeting a low energy building or specifically northeast chps. So it can definitely depend just kind of where the process is taking place. On the CHPs side of things, it again, will depend on the state because, you know, in Rhode Island, they do in house reviews of all the documentation that comes in. So they actually have the school building authority there in Rhode Island that reviews all the forms that were filled out. And then they’re the ones that actually, you know, say that yes, you met the chps criteria or no you didn’t because of these reasons and you know, this is what you can do next. In other states it’s submitted directly to chps, the organization itself, and they have reviewers on staff that, you know, go through all this paperwork and figure out whether you met the criteria or not. So, you know, kind of depends. There are different rules in different states, I guess.

Robb:                                19:35                   Earlier is better in any kind of design process to make sure you get the details right, I’m sure. I mean, you don’t want to be ready to start construction and then, hey, let’s make this high performance. I’m sure that this is even more the case for schools and then some other buildings.

Speaker 3:                        19:53                   Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think these projects sometimes take years and years. So the earlier you can get in and the more planning you can get done, and just kind of the more information that you can gather as a community or as a design team on, you know, how to accomplish these goals. The earlier the better for sure. We try to tell that to all our communities. And you know, a big piece of this is engaging with your local utilities. And that’s actually one of the prerequisites in northeast chps is, you know, making sure you’re working with utilities and getting the technical assistance in the financial incentives that they might have available to you. So that of course has to happen early on as well. So we’re always trying to push for schools to think about these things early and get the process started as soon as they can.

Robb:                                20:37                   So what’s the result? I mean, we mentioned earlier that, you know, good indoor environmental quality is great. It makes sense to want that in schools, but are there meaningful studies that show that, “hey, kids learn better, they actually do better” have people looked into that?

John:                                 20:57                   Yeah, there are definitely a bunch of good studies out there. There’s a lot of like anecdotal evidence from maybe one particular school that’s seen reduced absentee rates since they opened up a high-performance school. And, you know, one example I can share is the Concord school district in New Hampshire. They actually saw a pretty significant absentee rate reduction, and they opened up a few new high-performance schools back between 2010 and 2013, somewhere in that range. And they saw those reductions. So, you know, there’s a lot of things like that, but there are definitely some more kind of scientific formal studies out there. The Harvard, T.H. Chan School of Public Health is doing a lot of great work in this area right now. They have a couple of publications out there already that, you know, talk really in-depth about how the indoor environment impacts student thinking and health and test scores. So there’s certainly a lot of good information out there. The EPA actually has a lot of good resources on this as well. I think they have a whole webpage kind of dedicated to high performance schools. I’m not sure the exact title of that webpage, but you know, EPA and schools.

Robb:                                22:16                   Yeah, that’s cool. We can dig it up and we’ll put it on the show notes page as well as the link to the Harvard studies you said. And do you have cool case studies?

John:                                 22:30                   Yeah, we have a number of them on our websites. You know, I’ve done a bunch in the past few years. But yeah, we’re always looking to add to them too. So, you know, if you are ever working on a high performance school and want to create a case study I’m happy to work with whoever on that as well.

Robb:                                22:46                   Cool. How, how about existing schools? I mean we’ve been talking about new construction so far, but does chps or NEEP get into programs/methods to improve existing schools?

John:                                 23:00                   Yeah. So you can use northeast chps for new construction, for major renovation projects, or kind of in a phased approach. So, if you’re just kind of doing capital improvement projects here and there, over time you can actually become, chps verified. But the existing stock is obviously much larger than, you know, new construction buildings, so that’s a super important thing to be targeting on the NEEP side of things. We do a lot of work with facility directors. You know, we have a lot of strong connections with facility directors throughout the region. And we’re trying to help them understand what they can be doing to improve the efficiency of their buildings. We have this guide called the regional operations and maintenance guide for public buildings. So it goes beyond schools, but you know, a lot of it is targeted directly at schools and it provides a lot of best practices and lessons learned and kind of checklists. It’s a user friendly guide to help facility directors or others within the community really improve the efficiency of their existing building stock. So I think we have a lot of work to do as an industry as a hole on existing buildings. If we want to really improve some of the carbon emissions and our talk about climate change, you know, if we want to really improve those things, targeting the existing building stock is so important.

Robb:                                24:31                   Yeah. There’s a lot of them out there. It’s a big deal. And that’s a frustration. I mean, we work with a lot of designers and developers of new buildings, and they’re much, much, much, much better. And this is everybody’s scratching their heads about what we do with the 99% of buildings out there that are old?

John:                                 24:51                   Exactly. And one of the things that we always say is you got to start with understanding your building’s energy use. So, going through the benchmarking process, you know, using that portfolio manager tool that you mentioned earlier, that’s really kind of where you got to start. You got to take control. It’s just like, you know, if you’re trying to get control of your finances and your personal life, you kind of budget things out. And that’s kind of how I see looking at improving the energy in existing buildings. You know, you got to dive into it and try to figure out how much energy you’re using and where’s there’s some room for improvement. So that’s really the key first step to me.

Robb:                                25:29                   Yup. Fantastic point. Absolutely. I definitely agree. So what’s next? If we talk about this in five years, 10 years, any trends? Do You think that there’s some big changes happening? What ?are high performance schools going to look like? Or what the program’s going to look like down the road?

John:                                 25:48                   Yeah, it was interesting, I was listening to some of the earlier podcasts that you guys have produced and you know, you’re talking about zero energy buildings. and to me, I think that’s a really big one that’s being talked about really all over and in kind of small pockets of the region, these conversations are definitely happening. And depending on who you’re talking to, you know, you’ll get varying levels of, “oh yeah, that’s definitely possible at a similar budget to a regular or high performance building.” Others are a lot more skeptical and think that, you know, it costs a lot more. So, I think there’s certain tradeoffs, you know, specific to each project that can make projects a lot more if you’re targeting zero energy. But to me the important thing is really targeting a low EUI building. So just making sure that, you know, the building is conserving energy and using energy as efficiently as possible. And then tying in some of those renewable energy components into it as well. So yeah, NEEP is having these conversations across the region. I’m involved in conversations in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, so really, you know, it’s happening all over. There’s a couple of good examples down in Maryland, they had a zero energy pilot program where they selected three schools with some state funding there to get to zero energy. So I think there’s one school open now that’s, I’m not sure if it’s exactly at zero energy, but you know, I would imagine it’s pretty close if it’s not truly zero energy. And then there’s two more kind of coming online later this year. So, you know, we’re seeing more and more of these buildings pop up and I think schools are on the leading edge of this kind of zero energy movement. So, it’s really good to see, and hopefully, you know, with education kind of all-around across the market, we’ll be able to make this possible over the next five to 10 years for new construction at least.

Robb:                                27:52                   Awesome. Yeah. Schools may be a hot topic with zero energy buildings because they’re high visibility. People want high performance schools for all the reasons that we’ve been talking about. And they’re often fairly large low rise buildings with lots of roof area for solar. So yeah, I think it could be a winning combination. We’ll stay tuned for more zero energy schools.

John:                                 28:18                   I hope so.

Robb:                                28:20                   So, thanks John. Where do people go? I think we mentioned chps.org is the chps website

John:                                 28:28                   I think it’s actually chps.net. But no big deal. You’d probably get there either way.

Robb:                                28:34                   thank you for the correction, we’ll put the right link on our website and, and NEEP is .org right?

John:                                 28:43                   Yup, NEEP.org. You got that right. And I’ll just throw a plug for one of our tools that really helps communities kind of figure out what they should be taking on. It’s a tool we released early last year and it’s kind of a user-friendly guide for anyone in the community to walk through and, you know, point to specific projects that they should be taking on. So it’s called community action planning for energy efficiency. So if you’re, you know, listening and trying to figure out where your communities should be, kind of thinking about energy efficiency and what to take on first from forming an energy committee to building a high performance school. There’s all this information built into this cool new tool. So I just wanted to throw that out there as a good starting point for a lot of folks. If you know they’re overwhelmed with the mass amount of information that’s out there.

Robb:                                29:35                   Oh, cool. That sounds like it could be a great resource and that’s on the NEEP website and you can get to it from the NEEP website?

John:                                 29:42                   Yup, that’s correct.

Robb:                                29:42                   And we’ll link to that directly in the show notes too. Thanks very much, John.

New Speaker:                  29:55                   Thank you for listening to buildings and beyond. For more information about the topics discussed today, visit www.swinter.com/podcasts 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 [inaudible] and myself. Heather Breslin, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Iain Walker, PhD.

Iain Walker is a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). He has more than 20 years of experience as a building scientist and consultant, conducting research on energy use, ventilation, moisture, performance simulation, and commissioning/diagnostic issues in residential buildings. His current work focuses on retrofits, zero/low-energy homes and heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems in residential buildings through field and laboratory evaluations, modeling and simulation activities, and standards setting. Dr. Walker is the task group leader for the American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM) standards committees on building and duct system air leakage and sealant longevity. For the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) he serves on National Standards committees for indoor air quality, weather, moisture design, and equipment air leakage. He also serves on Building Performance Institute (BPI) and Residential Energy Services Network (RESNET) Technical Committees, the Affordable Comfort (ACI) conference planning committee and provides leadership and technical input to many local, state, national and international bodies. Read more

When you fire on a stove-top burner, whether it is electric, gas, or convection, many byproducts are released. This increase in moisture, gas, and other particulates is not only detrimental to the health of a building, but dangerous for human health as well.

To advance our knowledge on this topic, we invited building scientist and ventilation expert, Dr. Iain Walker, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Dr. Walker discusses strategies for controlling byproducts associated with cooking by focusing on kitchen ventilation.

Studies:

Guides/Resources:

Standards:

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.

Kelly: (00:24)
I am so glad you have decided to tune in to buildings and beyond this week because this applies to basically everyone. If you ever cook in your home, I think you’ll find this interesting. We are actually going to take a page from the Simon Sinex book and we are starting with why.

Iain: (00:42)
They should care because the idea is that when you cook, it’s basically one of the activities that you do that emits the most contaminants into, into your home and by contaminants- there are some pretty straightforward ones. Like there’s lots of water vapor when you’re cooking and if you don’t wanna have condensation on your windows in the winter for example, or you don’t want to make your house get too humid, so you might get some mold growth. Do you want to control the humidity levels in it? It’s a good idea to vent the moisture from cooking to outside. Then you have to think about odors. And of course, you know, some odors are good when, when you’re cooking, right? The, the odor is what makes you know, home cooking worthwhile sometimes and what’s make makes food tastes nice and everything. But if you’ve been frying fish one day, maybe you don’t want the smell of fried fish in your house for the next few days. And the last thing is more from a health perspective, which is that aside from the moisture and odor issues there are contaminants admitted when you cook that can actually impact your health. One of the primary ones is small particles and they come from either the burning of natural gas if you’re using a gas cooktop, or the cooking process itself. And then there are things like oxides of nitrogen that also are emitted from from gas burners. And those contaminants are ones that if they get to a high enough concentration can have some health impacts. So there’s a good health reason for venting most of those things to outside. And so it’s a combination of you want to control moisture in your home, you want to control odors in your home, and there’s a health impact also. And I’m not saying that you shouldnt cook. I personally love cooking and everybody should cook. I think a home cooked meal is probably the healthiest way to feed yourself, but we should do it with an awareness that it’s a good idea to control what we do when we’re cooking. And effectively the best way to do it is to vent some of these things to outside. So that’s the rationale for why you would vent a kitchen ever. And if you’ve ever been in a commercial kitchen, you’ll see that they have enormous range heads with huge amounts of flow and they’re physically large and they have gigantic makeup air systems and if you’re cooking all the time, they make a huge effort to vent the cooking to outside. Of course we cook less in our homes, but the principles behind it are for the same reason. It’s about controlling the moisture odor, and some of these contaminants that can have health impacts.

Kelly: (03:22)
Now, Iain Walker, who you just heard is a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, LBNL. He works as a building scientist and consultant conducting research on energy use, ventilation, moisture performance simulation and commissioning diagnostic issues in residential buildings. I encourage you to go to the show notes and look at the link to LBNL’s website. It turns out Iain has been doing ventilation research papers dating back to 1990. Whether you cook once in awhile or you cook all the time, whether you live in an apartment or a house, whether you have no renovation budget or unlimited- stay tuned, there will be something in this episode for you. I’ll let Iain give you a little background and lay the groundwork for you. So we’re going to jump right in.

Iain: (04:07)
Kitchen ventilation is not a new thing, right? It’s been around for a long, long time. But it’s only recently that we’ve done anything about it and in a way where we could actually put some numbers to it. And by that I mean kitchen rangers had been used and just, you know, simple vents and kitchens have been around for thousands of years. But actual kitchen rangers with a fan in them have been around for a while. But how good are they and how much of the contaminants they capture has been something that hasn’t really been studied until recently. And what we were really looking for was a way to figure out how well these devices work with a longer term goal of maybe we could make them work better even though they moved less air for example, because there surely is an energy penalty just in the fan power and also heating and cooling all that air that you’re exhausting. Right. So that’s why we wanted to like actually put some numbers on how well a range hoods work and try and figure out is there something about the geometry or the amount of airflow that makes some work better and some not and so on.

Kelly: (05:13)
Great. Yeah. And mostly, the research is looking at single family or low rise multifamily?

Iain: (05:22)
Well I wouldn’t say necessarily- no. I think, I everybody’s kitchen should get some good ventilation so I wouldn’t restrict it. But you raise a good point, which is it’s easier in some buildings than others, right? In a house, having an exhaust fan in your kitchen is not too difficult to conceive of. Right? Maybe you have to cut a hole in the wall or maybe in the ceiling if you’re gonna go out through the ceiling, put some ducting in. Seems pretty straight forward. But in a high rise building, it can be a little trickier. Often highrise architecture is much more sensitive to having lots of holes in the wall. And then if you’ve got many, many stories all stacked up on top of each other, you’ve got to find room for all that ducting in the end. And it does get a little more complex from an engineering perspective, but not impossible.

Kelly: (06:12)
So now say I’m a homeowner and maybe I don’t have any renovation budget, but what should I think about when I go to Cook my dinner tonight?

Iain: (06:22)
Well there’s some simple things you can do if you’re not going to remodel your kitchen or replace the range hood. The first thing, is you should know if your range ofvents to outside, that’s the first question there. There are many hoods over cooktops that just blow the air back into the kitchen and they’re not particularly effective at doing anything for controlling the things I just talked about. As you imagine, they just blow the moisture straight back in. They don’t do much for removing things like particles, oxides of nitrogen and they don’t control odor as much. They often will have a grease filter in, right, that you’ve probably seen, these sort of metal things. If you look underneath your hood, you’ll see this sort of metal grate and so it might stop some of the grease getting circulated your kitchen, But for the other stuff, it doesn’t do much. So first of all, you need to have something that vents to outside. If it’s just blowing back and greasing your forehead, then I’m ambivalent about whether you use it or not. It’s totally up to you. But I don’t think it’s doing very much. So As long as vents to outside, the first thing is to turn it on. And even the very worst hood is going to be better than not using it. So even if you think you have a bad one, try using it. The next thing is, if we’re talking now about a cooktop that’s up against the wall with a hood above it also mounted on the wall, they always do better at capturing from the burners at the back than the front. So if you can cook on the back burners it’s going to be way better. Of course, that’s also the most awkward way to cook. And so most people cook on the front burners for convenience. And so it’s always gonna be a personal tradeoff, but certainly using the back burners is going to be better for your range hood for getting it to to capture what’s on the cooktop. So even if you do nothing in your kitchen, you can at least turn it on and cook on the back burners. And, and that’s, that’s a big step forward.

Kelly: (08:18)
Awesome. That’s great. That’s great advice. And then I guess taking the next step, if I’ve maybe convinced my partner that we should decide to renovate our kitchen and we maybe have some renovation budget now, what should we look at or what should we talk to our builder about?

Iain: (08:36)
So here you’re talking about how do I pick my new range hood effectively? And there’s a couple of things you can do, that when you’re browsing through catalogs or you’re at the hardware store looking at these things. One is to simply look at the physical geometry of the hood. And the key thing is, does it come out far enough from the wall to cover all the burners? And basically the further out from the wall it comes, the more coverage it has generally speaking, the better it will perform. And this is just a simple sort of common sense exercise. If you imagine the hot air and the hot balloon that’s coming off your cooking it, it basically is going upwards. And if the hood doesn’t come out and cover that part of the cooktop, you can imagine that sort of hot air and plume and all the moisture and everything, it just goes in the kitchen and doesn’t get captured. It’s sort of a straightforward geometry thing. So if you can pick one that’s larger that that covers more of the cooktop area, that’s better. The other thing you’re deciding is what height to mount it at and you might think, well, the lower I get the better. Right? But that’s not always true. There’s sort of a range of mounting heights where we get reasonable performance. But you’re often going to be restricted by the cabinets that you choose also. And there are stock cabinet sizes that kind of limit your options there if you’re remodeling. But we usually want to aim for a height above the cooktop of something like 24 to 30 inches, if you will. That’s sort of measuring to the bottom of the hood. And it turns out that most modern kitchens with typical cabinetry, they’re going to have something in that sort of range.

Iain: (10:31)
If you’re using a microwave device, though, that that’s kind of different. The ones with the built in microwave tend to be mounted lower, for starters, and some of that simply because they are physically deeper top to bottom, right. If you’re mounting them under the same cabinet in your kitchen, it comes down lower. They also tend to not stick out very far and that means that they don’t have the greatest performance, honestly. And also they tend to suck air not just from underneath where the cooking is happening, but they often have vents around the top and the sides. And that’s what I would call more like general kitchen ventilation. So they are exhausting air but it’s from the kitchen, It’s not from directly over the cooking, So they’re less effective in that sense. So these microwave devices, sure you free up some counter space, but they are less effective as exhaust hoods for, for your cooking. Although I realize the popular in people liked them. So I would not say never install one, but you should understand that it’s not going to be quite as good as one that doesn’t have a microwave stuck in it.

Kelly: (11:35)
Just consider your alternatives in that case.

New Speaker: (11:38)
Right. And the last thing is that there are some ratings for hoods that are put out by an organization called the home ventilating institute or HVI and anyone could go to HVI.org and look at their ratings. And one of the key aspects of the ratings is to look at the the sound level, how noisy they are. Because in our research we found that as you can imagine, if a range hood is too noisy, people use it less particularly in a, in a modern kitchen, which has no wall between you and the dining room or living room. Like most modern homes are this open plan layout and the ferociously loud range hood, you can’t use it if you’re trying to watch television or the family’s trying to eat and have a conversation or something. It doesn’t work. Right. So you can try and look for quieter hoods. And in the future, those ratings are going to become a bit more advanced. And what they’re going to do is they’re going to start including something that we’re probably going to talk about for a couple of minutes here, which is something called capture efficiency, which is a rating for how well the cooking contaminants are captured and exhausted by the device. That’s not available yet. But a year from now when you’re shopping you should be able to pick a higher capture efficiency rated device also for exhausting your kitchen.

Kelly: (12:59)
Great. And can you dive into that a little bit? You’ve been doing some research on what the capture efficiency is of current range hoods. What does that look like from what you’ve seen in the market now?

Iain: (13:13)
Sure. So maybe I should define what we mean by capture efficiency first. Basically what capture efficiency is about is, when you emitting stuff from your cooking, what fraction of that get sucked into the range hood and blown directly to outside? So a poor range might say it only captures a third of all those cooking contaminants and it’s capture efficiency would be 33% or about a third. A very good range hood might capture 80 or 90%. So almost all of the cooking contaminants get sucked into the range hood and blown outside. And so capture efficiency is that rating that says how much of what I’m emitting from my cooking gets blown to outside. And we’ve done lots of experiments both in the laboratory at LBNL and also going out to people’s homes and testing, and there’s a huge range of performance for capture efficiency. And I touched on some of this earlier. It depends a bit on the geometry. You know, the physical dimensions of the hood in terms of how well it actually covers the cooktop. But as you listeners might imagine, often you have a switch that that changes the fan speed on your hood. And as you increase the fan speed, more and more air flows through it, the capture efficiency goes up. So you get the best capture efficiency at the highest flow rate. Unfortunately, that also tends to be the noisiest way to operate it. So there’s going to be a trade off in your kitchen, about how much noise can I stand. Generally the higher speed, the higher the airflow, the greater the noise and the better you will capture things. And at lower speeds, maybe you can still carry on a conversation, but it’s not capturing so well. And we have developed basically a standardized test method for this that is going to be adopted by HVI and other organizations so that everybody tests the same way. So that, you know, we standardize on things like what is the heat output of the burner that you’re looking at, and what method do you use to measure this capture efficiency and we’re using a tracer gas system for doing this. But it’s all in a very standardized, very controlled way. So all the test labs will get the same result if they test the same device in the same way. It’s all been engineered out to be very, very consistent. And theres several other test labs in the country that have been trying out this test method and also some European test labs also because we think that this way of rating for capture efficiency will probably find its way into international standards as well as being used here in the U.S.

Kelly: (16:03)
That’s great. So you’re working on that now. But can you talk a little bit about some of the other things that we can look for? You know, if I’m going to buy my range hood tomorrow, you spoke about noise and flow rate. What would you prescribe if I was going out and looking to pick something tomorrow?

Iain: (16:25)
If you’re picking something tomorrow, there’s sort of the minimum flow rate below which the devices don’t work particularly well. And some minimum flow rates are actually put into ventilation standards. For example, the U.S. National standard for ventilation says that the minimum flow rate should be 100 cubic feet per minute as a minimum flow rate. So if you’re looking at the flows that you’re going to get for your range hood you want to at least beat that minimum. Of course that’s the minimum, you can always do better. And if it was me picking a flow, I’d want to have at least 150, maybe 200 cfm as sort of the minimum flow rating that I would operate at. It’s a little complicated by the fact that almost all range of type of switch that lets you change the speed and change the flow, right? And on the very lowest flow, they might not be having that 100 cfm, but you probably get that on the medium. And then on the high flow rate you get up to 150 or 200 for a typical device. So you know, there’s always going to be a range of flows at the, at the more extreme end though for high end kitchens we see devices that are essentially looking at look like they should be in a commercial kitchen. Whether air flows are several CFM, maybe six, 700 cubic feet per minute. So like five times or six times what the minimum is. And that, that all seems like, hey, that should be awesome, right? Because now I’m going to get really good capture efficiency and all that sort of stuff, which could be true. But you pay a price in terms of noise for a start.These tend to be noisy to move all that air and the fact that all the air has to come into your house somewhere else, right? All the air that goes out comes in somewhere. And at the very high flow rates, that can be a difficult thing to manage for your home, and you can easily run into comfort issues. For example, if you lived somewhere cold and it’s winter time, all that extra cold air coming in has to be heated, which is, you know, going to cost you some energy. And if you have what we call makeup air, which has a deliberate duct to bring that air in, you have to be careful about where that air comes in. Because if you don’t heat it up in the winter, you get a horrible cold draft on people, so these very high end, very fancy higher flow devices bring a whole world of problems with them that currently the industry is not dealing with very well I would say. And it’s important when you’re picking these things to be aware that it’s not so simple as buying the biggest thing you can and turning it on, there are other consequences that we have to deal with when we do that, but that’s only for these very large, very high end devices. For your more typical thing that you might put in your kitchen, those higher air flows are less of a concern because they simply don’t move that much air.

Kelly: (19:22)
Right. Compared to the overall building size?

Iain: (19:24)
correct, yes. Well it’s not so much building size. It has to do with things like if you are living a very energy efficient home, they tend to be what we call very airtight homes. In other words, they don’t have very many leaks in the building to let air in or out. And if you have one of these very big exhaust fans, often they will actually move a lot less air than they say, cause it’s simply so hard to suck the air in through the very tight shell of the home. And sometimes we also have concerns about what about if you have a water heater in your house that takes its combustion air from your home? So this is not a sealed off unit. It’s not outside or in a garage or anything, It’s actually in the home with you, and that there are plenty of homes that have this, right. If you exhaust too much, you might pull the exhaust from the water heater into the house with you. So, you know, all of those combustion products that I talked about from the cooking, from your water heater, are coming in the house, which is, you know, water vapor and particles and, and carbon dioxide.All sorts of stuff. So there are some issues that we do have to think about if we install very, very large exhaust systems in homes that have what we call these natural draft combustion applIainces in the home with them. I will say though that there are tests you can do to make sure that those devices are not overpowering the ability of your say water heater to draft properly. Organizations like the building performance institute and others have got, you know, test test protocols to, to evaluate this sort of thing. But, but again, I would argue for keeping your life simple and not buying a gigantic hood with a lot of flow, and going with something more moderate.

Kelly: (21:23)
Right. Yeah. And actually it’s interesting anecdotally obviously, but I’m up in Vermont this week and we have a lot of fireplaces and we actually had a situation the other night where the fireplace was running and somebody went into the bathroom and turned the fan on that’s integrated with the light switch. And there was a series of circumstances that made it such that we back drafted from the, the fireplace and smoke kind of came into the room.

Iain: (21:59)
Yes, it’s, it’s a real issue and it can happen and we should avoid it if we can. And again, I think this is an argument for using a more moderate airflow for your kitchen range hood if you can, and I realized that sometimes these are lifestyle decisions, not building science decisions and who am I to decide I can only, I can only advise people to avoid bad situations.

Kelly: (22:24)
Right. Of course. It’s one perspective of the whole construction game.

Iain: (22:29)
Well, I mean this is often the case when we talk about people’s homes is that a lot of the things in a home are inter-linked in these ways, right? The exhaust from the kitchen does great things to get rid of the contaminants in the kitchen, but we have to make sure we’re not messing up the home somewhere else.

Kelly: (22:48)
Right. That’s an excellent point. Thinking about that everything that you’re doing in the home as a full system. And what’s the impact on the whole system?

Iain: (22:57)
That’s right. Your house is a system is sort of a something we often say.

Kelly: (23:01)
And and were the building doctors or something

Iain: (23:06)
Possibly. And as any good doctor, we always have to firstly do no harm, right? We have to make sure that the things we do don’t end up making things worse. Right? But it’s a, it’s important thing but, but, but generally for most circumstances, you’re a moderately sized kitchen exhaust hood is not going to create very many problems in your home unless, and I s as I say, there are exceptions, but you know, some of this is becoming less and less important. This might be aside, but it’s certainly with thinking about, that most high-performance homes these days, they don’t have these gas fueled applIainces that are actually using the air from the house. They’re either using what we call sealed combustion and most high efficiency furnaces. They’re taking their combustion air from outside through its own little duct.

Iain: (23:58)
It gets burned and then the flume goes back outside again. And that furnace isn’t communicating with your home in any way. And so it doesn’t really matter very much if you depressurize the house was an exhaust fan because that furnace is not communicating with the home. Or if you have a, an all electric home with say, heat pumps for heating and cooling and for hot water, then again, you don’t have to worry about it. But, but, but you crazy folks that want to burn wood in a fireplace. I mean there are solutions there too. I mean, again, in a high performance home, a good idea is to have what we call her a sealed fireplace. Where the fireplace is taking its combustion air from outside burning the word and then the, yeah, the smoke and everything goes back outside again and it’s not communicating with your home. And often these things will have, they have a, you know, a nice glass front on them so you can see the flames and the warmth comes through. But you couldn’t reach out your hand and touch the flames. But older homes, you know, like the one I live in, I don’t have that. I just have an open fireplace because I live in California so I can’t use it very often. But you know, you take your chances.

Kelly: (25:10)
Yeah, those are great points. Circling us back to the kitchen a little bit and cause I think that this is actually of interest to a lot of people. And not exactly kitchen hood exhaust but the cooker itself. So can you talk a little bit about our cooktop options and what your thoughts are on those?

Iain: (25:29)
Definitely. So, so they broadly fall into three categories if you want to do some cooking, right. There is a gas burner. There’s what we call an electric resistance element. That’s usually the spiral thing. You can see that glows red hot. And the third one is what’s called an induction cooktop where there’s nothing that gets hot and instead an induction field is induced in your metallic Cook Pot and the pot is heated directly rather than having gas be burned or a hot spiral element. And they are quite a bit different in terms of what happens when you turn them on. And the gas cooking is the one that produces the most contaminants because when you burn natural gas, you get a lot of water vapor which you need to control. There are also lots of particles generated, which are a health concern, oxides of nitrogen that again are a health concern and possibly some other volatile organic compounds that come from the combustion process. And so there’s more contaminants produced the gas cooking than the other ways. So the hot electric element is sort of halfway in between it. We’re not burning anything anymore. So we don’t actually produce any water vapor or oxides of nitrogen, but you never can get those heating elements so clean that they don’t admit some particles, and the particle emission is not as high as burning the natural gas, but there’s still plenty of small particles emitted when you use electric cooking. And finally the induction cooktop because effectively there isn’t something that’s super duper hot. You need heat to volatilize things to create the particles, it creates by far the least particles. It doesn’t create any water vapor, no oxides of nitrogen. So if you’re looking to cook in a healthy way that isn’t healthy because the food you’re cooking is healthy, but because you’re not putting contaminants in the air, an induction cooked up is definitely the way to go in all our testing and testing that other people have done, Induction cooking is definitely the cleanest. There is one other thing to think about though, and that is the oven and we don’t really have induction ovens per se, right? They usually either electric or gas and again, you sort of have the same breakdown where gas is going to produce the most particles and so on and, and the electric less so. They, they can be a little trickier when we’re thinking about venting. When we talk about the capture efficiency for hoods, we’re just looking at what happens on the cooktop. We’ve not looked at including in the rating what happens from the oven. And some of that is because the way the ovens are vented depends on a lot on the particular construction of the oven you’re using or the range that you’re using and where the hot air comes out. Sometimes it’s at the back, sometimes at the front, sometimes it’s a bit of both. And so it was sort of hard to standardize a way to think about capturing from the oven. But even if you’re not using the cooktop and you’re baking some bread or something, it’s still a good idea to turn on your exhaust hood because you’re still getting contaminants emitted into your kitchen. Maybe not as much as a very, very hot stir fry. Right? But they’re still there and you should still vent them. And maybe you just, you just leave it on low or something and do that. So it’s, it’s an important point to notice that, you know, when you’re cooking in the oven, things get emitted too, and the last thing I’ll say about this is sometimes in very, very fancy high end kitchens, you might have multiple ovens and maybe you have a cooktop with an oven underneath it with a hood over it. But on the wall next to it is a second oven. Well it’s not underneath the range hood anymore, but that’s okay because once again, turning your range hood on, it’s also ventilating the whole kitchen. Right. And it’s stopping the pollutants from traveling from your kitchen to other places in the home because as you exhaust out of the kitchen, the air has to come from somewhere and that airflow into the kitchen tends to control the transport of these contaminants around your house. And so even if what you’re doing isn’t directly under the hood, when you turn on the hood, you’re still sucking air out of the kitchen and ventilating the kitchen and moving those contaminants. It’s not as efficient as it is when it’s directly over the cook top, but it’s still something that’s worthwhile. And indeed, there are many other kitchen ventilation approaches that don’t use a range with per se. Right. Sometimes there’s just a fan in the wall or a fan in the ceiling that exhausts the whole room. And again, they work, they’re just not as efficient as a range hood and in order to get to the same levels of contaminants in the kitchen, if you just generally ventilating in the kitchen, you have to ventilate a lot more than if it’s just the range hood, and so those are less effective but it’s not like it has zero effect.

Kelly: (30:52)
Right. Great Point. Yeah. So thank you. There’s a lot of key takeaways here. I would say some of my top ones are number one, use your exhaust fan. Number two, vent it to the outside directly. And my number three is I should get an induction stove so I can make a bacon cheeseburger and call it healthy cooking.

Iain: (31:21)
I wouldn’t, I’m not sure I’m going to agree completely with your point number three about whether what you’re eating is healthy, but in terms of what you were emittnig and what you’re breathing. It might be slightly healthier. And, you know, I’m not against gas cooking, I cook with gas myself, right. But I use my range at a lot. And I understand that, that there are people that have, they love to cook and they have an affinity for using gas and I’m never going to tell them to not do it right. But I’m gonna tell them, you know, the air in your kitchen is going to have less contaminants if you use the induction, I mean I think my next cooktop will be induction even though I like to cook a lot.

Kelly: (32:03)
All right, good to know. So, we like to ask this, if we have you back on the podcast in five years, maybe 10 years, what will we be talking about then? Besides how awesome your induction cooktop is

Iain: (32:20)
I think we’ll be talking about a couple of things. I think that the design of range hoods is going to get better. And by that I mean we’ll get the same amount of the contaminants captured and exhausted from the kitchen at a lower air flow. And I like that because it means it’ll be quieter, which people are much more likely to use their hoods. And it means that if we move less air that’s less air we have to heat up or cool down, you know, that goes in and out of the house. And so that’s going to be something that I think we’re gonna see the range of manufacturers looking into. The next thing is, is, is automation, which is, you know, we made this point about range, that it only works if it’s turned on right. But once we have got good designs that capture well and arent noisy because they move less air or else theyre better aerodynamic designs, then I think we can move down the path of let’s automate these devices so they will sense that you’re cooking and turn on automatically and they’re likely to turn on at, at a low airflow and there’ll be a switch that you as the cook can still use. Like if you, if you start to burn something, you could turn it on to high. Right. But they’re gonna automatically operate. So it’s not dependent on, on the cook to turn it on. It’s going to be automatic. And the automation is an extension of, there are some high end hoods out now that have what I’ll call an emergency switch in them. If they get very, very hot, they’re intended to detect a cooktop fire and go into high speed. It’s a safety thing. And those controls strategies are going to get adapted to be more sensitive and use some different ways of sensing the cooking, not just the temperature of the air, but maybe some infrared sensing and things like that. And we’re gonna automate range hoods and I, and I think that sort of performance improvement and automation are going to be the two big changes that we see in sometime in the next five years. These things are going to become relatively mainstream.

Kelly: (34:25)
Okay. That sounds great. You did mention three things at first, do you have a third or are we going to have to wait and see?

Iain: (34:34)
There is a third one and this is something that may be a bit of a stretch and that is that there are some applications where people would like to recirculate. And the reason why I was gonna say it is third and then then I changed my mind is that I understand that with these devices you could certainly put in a good particle filter to move the particles. You could put some active charcoal carbon filters in there to remove some of the vcs, but youre still gonna have a hard time with removing the water vapor. Right. And that’s always gonna be an issue if you cook a lot, you know, and you don’t want condensation and we don’t want higher moisture levels in our homes. And it also has the issue of, it’s really relying on the homeowner to regularly change out all those filters. And from what we know from how people use their homes in particular, looking at how often people change the filters in the heating and cooling systems, we’re pretty sure we can’t rely on people to do that. So this, this is a third option and it’s being investigated mostly for like Super Duper, super tight homes where they want to keep the heat in. If you’re familiar with the, the passive house system where houses are very, very airtight and they are doing an amazing job of controlling all the heat flows. In the winter, they want to keep the cooking heat in the house as heat because they don’t want to turn on the heating system. And so they would like to have recirculating systems that allow them to do that. But I think there’s still, you know, a couple of really serious issues with those where I would be comfortable in recommending them. So they could be the third thing, and there’s certainly a bunch of work being done right now on how do we improve the filtration of these things. How good a filter do we need? And so on. But like I said, they have a couple of key drawbacks, which is they don’t remove the moisture and they do require a lot of maintenance. That means that- I won’t say they’re terrible, I’m just not their biggest fan.

Kelly: (36:41)
Right. That sounds great. So maybe we’ll put that on the 10 year horizon and we’ll check what they’ve got going on then

Iain: (36:49)
Maybe we’ll see. I just always prefer simpler things because they’re harder to break. Right. And you know, you want to buy something that’s gonna work for at least 10 years. And so the idea of, you know, robust things that don’t require you to maintain them all the time seem like they’re much, much more likely to be working in 10 years.

Kelly: (37:11)
That’s an excellent point and I think it is a good end note. So I want to thank you so much for your time today and for coming on the podcast and coordinating this remote recording with our team. Thank you so much Iain.

Iain: (37:27)
Well thank you Kelly. I’m happy to talk about these things as you can probably tell.

Kelly: (37:31)
Great. We’ll have you back on soon.

Iain: (37:35)
All right. Thanks, Kelly.

Kelly: (37:42)
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.

When you fire on a stove-top burner, whether it is electric, gas, or convection, many byproducts are released. This increase in moisture, gas, and other particulates is not only detrimental to the health of a building, but dangerous for human health as well.

To advance our knowledge on this topic, we invited building scientist and ventilation expert, Dr. Iain Walker, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Dr. Walker discusses strategies for controlling byproducts associated with cooking by focusing on kitchen ventilation.

Episode Guests: Iain Walker, PhD.

Iain Walker is a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). He has more than 20 years of experience as a building scientist and consultant, conducting research on energy use, ventilation, moisture, performance simulation, and commissioning/diagnostic issues in residential buildings. His current work focuses on retrofits, zero/low-energy homes and heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems in residential buildings through field and laboratory evaluations, modeling and simulation activities, and standards setting. Dr. Walker is the task group leader for the American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM) standards committees on building and duct system air leakage and sealant longevity. For the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) he serves on National Standards committees for indoor air quality, weather, moisture design, and equipment air leakage. He also serves on Building Performance Institute (BPI) and Residential Energy Services Network (RESNET) Technical Committees, the Affordable Comfort (ACI) conference planning committee and provides leadership and technical input to many local, state, national and international bodies.

Studies:

Indoor Air Quality: Residential Cooking Exposures 

Measurement of Ultrafine Particles and Other Air Pollutants Emitted by Cooking Activities

Particle Concentrations in Inner-city Homes of Children with Asthma…

Impact of Natural Gas Appliances on Pollutant Levels in California Homes

Indoor Air Quality in 24 California Residences Designed as High Performance Green Homes

Guides/Resources:

HVI Guide

HVI Products Directory

Standards:

ANSI/ASHRAE Standards for Ventilation and Indoor Air Quality

ANSI/BPI: Home Energy Auditing Standard

ANSI/BPI: Standard Practice for Basic Analysis of Buildings

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

High Performance Schools with John Balfe from NEEP

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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.

Kelly:                                  00:24                   I am so glad you have decided to tune in to buildings and beyond this week because this applies to basically everyone. If you ever cook in your home, I think you’ll find this interesting. We are actually going to take a page from the Simon Sinex book and we are starting with why.

Ian:                                    00:42                   They should care because the idea is that when you cook, it’s basically one of the activities that you do that emits the most contaminants into, into your home and by contaminants- there are some pretty straightforward ones. Like there’s lots of water vapor when you’re cooking and if you don’t wanna have condensation on your windows in the winter for example, or you don’t want to make your house get too humid, so you might get some mold growth. Do you want to control the humidity levels in it? It’s a good idea to vent the moisture from cooking to outside. Then you have to think about odors. And of course, you know, some odors are good when, when you’re cooking, right? The, the odor is what makes you know, home cooking worthwhile sometimes and what’s make makes food tastes nice and everything. But if you’ve been frying fish one day, maybe you don’t want the smell of fried fish in your house for the next few days. And the last thing is more from a health perspective, which is that aside from the moisture and odor issues there are contaminants admitted when you cook that can actually impact your health. One of the primary ones is small particles and they come from either the burning of natural gas if you’re using a gas cooktop, or the cooking process itself. And then there are things like oxides of nitrogen that also are emitted from from gas burners. And those contaminants are ones that if they get to a high enough concentration can have some health impacts. So there’s a good health reason for venting most of those things to outside. And so it’s a combination of you want to control moisture in your home, you want to control odors in your home, and there’s a health impact also. And I’m not saying that you shouldnt cook. I personally love cooking and everybody should cook. I think a home cooked meal is probably the healthiest way to feed yourself, but we should do it with an awareness that it’s a good idea to control what we do when we’re cooking. And effectively the best way to do it is to vent some of these things to outside. So that’s the rationale for why you would vent a kitchen ever. And if you’ve ever been in a commercial kitchen, you’ll see that they have enormous range heads with huge amounts of flow and they’re physically large and they have gigantic makeup air systems and if you’re cooking all the time, they make a huge effort to vent the cooking to outside. Of course we cook less in our homes, but the principles behind it are for the same reason. It’s about controlling the moisture odor, and some of these contaminants that can have health impacts.

Kelly:                                  03:22                   Now, Ian Walker, who you just heard is a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, LBNL. He works as a building scientist and consultant conducting research on energy use, ventilation, moisture performance simulation and commissioning diagnostic issues in residential buildings. I encourage you to go to the show notes and look at the link to LBNL’s website. It turns out Ian has been doing ventilation research papers dating back to 1990. Whether you cook once in awhile or you cook all the time, whether you live in an apartment or a house, whether you have no renovation budget or unlimited- stay tuned, there will be something in this episode for you. I’ll let Ian give you a little background and lay the groundwork for you. So we’re going to jump right in.

Ian:                                    04:07                   Kitchen ventilation is not a new thing, right? It’s been around for a long, long time. But it’s only recently that we’ve done anything about it and in a way where we could actually put some numbers to it. And by that I mean kitchen rangers had been used and just, you know, simple vents and kitchens have been around for thousands of years. But actual kitchen rangers with a fan in them have been around for a while. But how good are they and how much of the contaminants they capture has been something that hasn’t really been studied until recently. And what we were really looking for was a way to figure out how well these devices work with a longer term goal of maybe we could make them work better even though they moved less air for example, because there surely is an energy penalty just in the fan power and also heating and cooling all that air that you’re exhausting. Right. So that’s why we wanted to like actually put some numbers on how well a range hoods work and try and figure out is there something about the geometry or the amount of airflow that makes some work better and some not and so on.

Kelly:                                  05:13                   Great. Yeah. And mostly, the research is looking at single family or low rise multifamily?

Ian:                                    05:22                   Well I wouldn’t say necessarily- no. I think, I everybody’s kitchen should get some good ventilation so I wouldn’t restrict it. But you raise a good point, which is it’s easier in some buildings than others, right? In a house, having an exhaust fan in your kitchen is not too difficult to conceive of. Right? Maybe you have to cut a hole in the wall or maybe in the ceiling if you’re gonna go out through the ceiling, put some ducting in. Seems pretty straight forward. But in a high rise building, it can be a little trickier. Often highrise architecture is much more sensitive to having lots of holes in the wall. And then if you’ve got many, many stories all stacked up on top of each other, you’ve got to find room for all that ducting in the end. And it does get a little more complex from an engineering perspective, but not impossible.

Kelly:                                  06:12                   So now say I’m a homeowner and maybe I don’t have any renovation budget, but what should I think about when I go to Cook my dinner tonight?

Ian:                                    06:22                   Well there’s some simple things you can do if you’re not going to remodel your kitchen or replace the range hood. The first thing, is you should know if your range ofvents to outside, that’s the first question there. There are many hoods over cooktops that just blow the air back into the kitchen and they’re not particularly effective at doing anything for controlling the things I just talked about. As you imagine, they just blow the moisture straight back in. They don’t do much for removing things like particles, oxides of nitrogen and they don’t control odor as much. They often will have a grease filter in, right, that you’ve probably seen, these sort of metal things. If you look underneath your hood, you’ll see this sort of metal grate and so it might stop some of the grease getting circulated your kitchen, But for the other stuff, it doesn’t do much. So first of all, you need to have something that vents to outside. If it’s just blowing back and greasing your forehead, then I’m ambivalent about whether you use it or not. It’s totally up to you. But I don’t think it’s doing very much. So As long as vents to outside, the first thing is to turn it on. And even the very worst hood is going to be better than not using it. So even if you think you have a bad one, try using it. The next thing is, if we’re talking now about a cooktop that’s up against the wall with a hood above it also mounted on the wall, they always do better at capturing from the burners at the back than the front. So if you can cook on the back burners it’s going to be way better. Of course, that’s also the most awkward way to cook. And so most people cook on the front burners for convenience. And so it’s always gonna be a personal tradeoff, but certainly using the back burners is going to be better for your range hood for getting it to to capture what’s on the cooktop. So even if you do nothing in your kitchen, you can at least turn it on and cook on the back burners. And, and that’s, that’s a big step forward.

Kelly:                                  08:18                   Awesome. That’s great. That’s great advice. And then I guess taking the next step, if I’ve maybe convinced my partner that we should decide to renovate our kitchen and we maybe have some renovation budget now, what should we look at or what should we talk to our builder about?

Ian:                                    08:36                   So here you’re talking about how do I pick my new range hood effectively? And there’s a couple of things you can do, that when you’re browsing through catalogs or you’re at the hardware store looking at these things. One is to simply look at the physical geometry of the hood. And the key thing is, does it come out far enough from the wall to cover all the burners? And basically the further out from the wall it comes, the more coverage it has generally speaking, the better it will perform. And this is just a simple sort of common sense exercise. If you imagine the hot air and the hot balloon that’s coming off your cooking it, it basically is going upwards. And if the hood doesn’t come out and cover that part of the cooktop, you can imagine that sort of hot air and plume and all the moisture and everything, it just goes in the kitchen and doesn’t get captured. It’s sort of a straightforward geometry thing. So if you can pick one that’s larger that that covers more of the cooktop area, that’s better. The other thing you’re deciding is what height to mount it at and you might think, well, the lower I get the better. Right? But that’s not always true. There’s sort of a range of mounting heights where we get reasonable performance. But you’re often going to be restricted by the cabinets that you choose also. And there are stock cabinet sizes that kind of limit your options there if you’re remodeling. But we usually want to aim for a height above the cooktop of something like 24 to 30 inches, if you will. That’s sort of measuring to the bottom of the hood. And it turns out that most modern kitchens with typical cabinetry, they’re going to have something in that sort of range.

Ian:                                    10:31                   If you’re using a microwave device, though, that that’s kind of different. The ones with the built in microwave tend to be mounted lower, for starters, and some of that simply because they are physically deeper top to bottom, right. If you’re mounting them under the same cabinet in your kitchen, it comes down lower. They also tend to not stick out very far and that means that they don’t have the greatest performance, honestly. And also they tend to suck air not just from underneath where the cooking is happening, but they often have vents around the top and the sides. And that’s what I would call more like general kitchen ventilation. So they are exhausting air but it’s from the kitchen, It’s not from directly over the cooking, So they’re less effective in that sense. So these microwave devices, sure you free up some counter space, but they are less effective as exhaust hoods for, for your cooking. Although I realize the popular in people liked them. So I would not say never install one, but you should understand that it’s not going to be quite as good as one that doesn’t have a microwave stuck in it.

Kelly:                                  11:35                   Just consider your alternatives in that case.

New Speaker:                  11:38                   Right. And the last thing is that there are some ratings for hoods that are put out by an organization called the home ventilating institute or HVI and anyone could go to HVI.org and look at their ratings. And one of the key aspects of the ratings is to look at the the sound level, how noisy they are. Because in our research we found that as you can imagine, if a range hood is too noisy, people use it less particularly in a, in a modern kitchen, which has no wall between you and the dining room or living room. Like most modern homes are this open plan layout and the ferociously loud range hood, you can’t use it if you’re trying to watch television or the family’s trying to eat and have a conversation or something. It doesn’t work. Right. So you can try and look for quieter hoods. And in the future, those ratings are going to become a bit more advanced. And what they’re going to do is they’re going to start including something that we’re probably going to talk about for a couple of minutes here, which is something called capture efficiency, which is a rating for how well the cooking contaminants are captured and exhausted by the device. That’s not available yet. But a year from now when you’re shopping you should be able to pick a higher capture efficiency rated device also for exhausting your kitchen.

Kelly:                                  12:59                   Great. And can you dive into that a little bit? You’ve been doing some research on what the capture efficiency is of current range hoods. What does that look like from what you’ve seen in the market now?

Ian:                                    13:13                   Sure. So maybe I should define what we mean by capture efficiency first. Basically what capture efficiency is about is, when you emitting stuff from your cooking, what fraction of that get sucked into the range hood and blown directly to outside? So a poor range might say it only captures a third of all those cooking contaminants and it’s capture efficiency would be 33% or about a third. A very good range hood might capture 80 or 90%. So almost all of the cooking contaminants get sucked into the range hood and blown outside. And so capture efficiency is that rating that says how much of what I’m emitting from my cooking gets blown to outside. And we’ve done lots of experiments both in the laboratory at LBNL and also going out to people’s homes and testing, and there’s a huge range of performance for capture efficiency. And I touched on some of this earlier. It depends a bit on the geometry. You know, the physical dimensions of the hood in terms of how well it actually covers the cooktop. But as you listeners might imagine, often you have a switch that that changes the fan speed on your hood. And as you increase the fan speed, more and more air flows through it, the capture efficiency goes up. So you get the best capture efficiency at the highest flow rate. Unfortunately, that also tends to be the noisiest way to operate it. So there’s going to be a trade off in your kitchen, about how much noise can I stand. Generally the higher speed, the higher the airflow, the greater the noise and the better you will capture things. And at lower speeds, maybe you can still carry on a conversation, but it’s not capturing so well. And we have developed basically a standardized test method for this that is going to be adopted by HVI and other organizations so that everybody tests the same way. So that, you know, we standardize on things like what is the heat output of the burner that you’re looking at, and what method do you use to measure this capture efficiency and we’re using a tracer gas system for doing this. But it’s all in a very standardized, very controlled way. So all the test labs will get the same result if they test the same device in the same way. It’s all been engineered out to be very, very consistent. And theres several other test labs in the country that have been trying out this test method and also some European test labs also because we think that this way of rating for capture efficiency will probably find its way into international standards as well as being used here in the U.S.

Kelly:                                  16:03                   That’s great. So you’re working on that now. But can you talk a little bit about some of the other things that we can look for? You know, if I’m going to buy my range hood tomorrow, you spoke about noise and flow rate. What would you prescribe if I was going out and looking to pick something tomorrow?

Ian:                                    16:25                   If you’re picking something tomorrow, there’s sort of the minimum flow rate below which the devices don’t work particularly well. And some minimum flow rates are actually put into ventilation standards. For example, the U.S. National standard for ventilation says that the minimum flow rate should be 100 cubic feet per minute as a minimum flow rate. So if you’re looking at the flows that you’re going to get for your range hood you want to at least beat that minimum. Of course that’s the minimum, you can always do better. And if it was me picking a flow, I’d want to have at least 150, maybe 200 cfm as sort of the minimum flow rating that I would operate at. It’s a little complicated by the fact that almost all range of type of switch that lets you change the speed and change the flow, right? And on the very lowest flow, they might not be having that 100 cfm, but you probably get that on the medium. And then on the high flow rate you get up to 150 or 200 for a typical device. So you know, there’s always going to be a range of flows at the, at the more extreme end though for high end kitchens we see devices that are essentially looking at look like they should be in a commercial kitchen. Whether air flows are several CFM, maybe six, 700 cubic feet per minute. So like five times or six times what the minimum is. And that, that all seems like, hey, that should be awesome, right? Because now I’m going to get really good capture efficiency and all that sort of stuff, which could be true. But you pay a price in terms of noise for a start.These tend to be noisy to move all that air and the fact that all the air has to come into your house somewhere else, right? All the air that goes out comes in somewhere. And at the very high flow rates, that can be a difficult thing to manage for your home, and you can easily run into comfort issues. For example, if you lived somewhere cold and it’s winter time, all that extra cold air coming in has to be heated, which is, you know, going to cost you some energy. And if you have what we call makeup air, which has a deliberate duct to bring that air in, you have to be careful about where that air comes in. Because if you don’t heat it up in the winter, you get a horrible cold draft on people, so these very high end, very fancy higher flow devices bring a whole world of problems with them that currently the industry is not dealing with very well I would say. And it’s important when you’re picking these things to be aware that it’s not so simple as buying the biggest thing you can and turning it on, there are other consequences that we have to deal with when we do that, but that’s only for these very large, very high end devices. For your more typical thing that you might put in your kitchen, those higher air flows are less of a concern because they simply don’t move that much air.

Kelly:                                  19:22                   Right. Compared to the overall building size?

Ian:                                    19:24                   correct, yes. Well it’s not so much building size. It has to do with things like if you are living a very energy efficient home, they tend to be what we call very airtight homes. In other words, they don’t have very many leaks in the building to let air in or out. And if you have one of these very big exhaust fans, often they will actually move a lot less air than they say, cause it’s simply so hard to suck the air in through the very tight shell of the home. And sometimes we also have concerns about what about if you have a water heater in your house that takes its combustion air from your home? So this is not a sealed off unit. It’s not outside or in a garage or anything, It’s actually in the home with you, and that there are plenty of homes that have this, right. If you exhaust too much, you might pull the exhaust from the water heater into the house with you. So, you know, all of those combustion products that I talked about from the cooking, from your water heater, are coming in the house, which is, you know, water vapor and particles and, and carbon dioxide.All sorts of stuff. So there are some issues that we do have to think about if we install very, very large exhaust systems in homes that have what we call these natural draft combustion appliances in the home with them. I will say though that there are tests you can do to make sure that those devices are not overpowering the ability of your say water heater to draft properly. Organizations like the building performance institute and others have got, you know, test test protocols to, to evaluate this sort of thing. But, but again, I would argue for keeping your life simple and not buying a gigantic hood with a lot of flow, and going with something more moderate.

Kelly:                                  21:23                   Right. Yeah. And actually it’s interesting anecdotally obviously, but I’m up in Vermont this week and we have a lot of fireplaces and we actually had a situation the other night where the fireplace was running and somebody went into the bathroom and turned the fan on that’s integrated with the light switch. And there was a series of circumstances that made it such that we back drafted from the, the fireplace and smoke kind of came into the room.

Ian:                                    21:59                   Yes, it’s, it’s a real issue and it can happen and we should avoid it if we can. And again, I think this is an argument for using a more moderate airflow for your kitchen range hood if you can, and I realized that sometimes these are lifestyle decisions, not building science decisions and who am I to decide I can only, I can only advise people to avoid bad situations.

Kelly:                                  22:24                   Right. Of course. It’s one perspective of the whole construction game.

Ian:                                    22:29                   Well, I mean this is often the case when we talk about people’s homes is that a lot of the things in a home are inter-linked in these ways, right? The exhaust from the kitchen does great things to get rid of the contaminants in the kitchen, but we have to make sure we’re not messing up the home somewhere else.

Kelly:                                  22:48                   Right. That’s an excellent point. Thinking about that everything that you’re doing in the home as a full system. And what’s the impact on the whole system?

Ian:                                    22:57                   That’s right. Your house is a system is sort of a something we often say.

Kelly:                                  23:01                   And and were the building doctors or something

Ian:                                    23:06                   Possibly. And as any good doctor, we always have to firstly do no harm, right? We have to make sure that the things we do don’t end up making things worse. Right? But it’s a, it’s important thing but, but, but generally for most circumstances, you’re a moderately sized kitchen exhaust hood is not going to create very many problems in your home unless, and I s as I say, there are exceptions, but you know, some of this is becoming less and less important. This might be aside, but it’s certainly with thinking about, that most high-performance homes these days, they don’t have these gas fueled appliances that are actually using the air from the house. They’re either using what we call sealed combustion and most high efficiency furnaces. They’re taking their combustion air from outside through its own little duct.

Ian:                                    23:58                   It gets burned and then the flume goes back outside again. And that furnace isn’t communicating with your home in any way. And so it doesn’t really matter very much if you depressurize the house was an exhaust fan because that furnace is not communicating with the home. Or if you have a, an all electric home with say, heat pumps for heating and cooling and for hot water, then again, you don’t have to worry about it. But, but, but you crazy folks that want to burn wood in a fireplace. I mean there are solutions there too. I mean, again, in a high performance home, a good idea is to have what we call her a sealed fireplace. Where the fireplace is taking its combustion air from outside burning the word and then the, yeah, the smoke and everything goes back outside again and it’s not communicating with your home. And often these things will have, they have a, you know, a nice glass front on them so you can see the flames and the warmth comes through. But you couldn’t reach out your hand and touch the flames. But older homes, you know, like the one I live in, I don’t have that. I just have an open fireplace because I live in California so I can’t use it very often. But you know, you take your chances.

Kelly:                                  25:10                   Yeah, those are great points. Circling us back to the kitchen a little bit and cause I think that this is actually of interest to a lot of people. And not exactly kitchen hood exhaust but the cooker itself. So can you talk a little bit about our cooktop options and what your thoughts are on those?

Ian:                                    25:29                   Definitely. So, so they broadly fall into three categories if you want to do some cooking, right. There is a gas burner. There’s what we call an electric resistance element. That’s usually the spiral thing. You can see that glows red hot. And the third one is what’s called an induction cooktop where there’s nothing that gets hot and instead an induction field is induced in your metallic Cook Pot and the pot is heated directly rather than having gas be burned or a hot spiral element. And they are quite a bit different in terms of what happens when you turn them on. And the gas cooking is the one that produces the most contaminants because when you burn natural gas, you get a lot of water vapor which you need to control. There are also lots of particles generated, which are a health concern, oxides of nitrogen that again are a health concern and possibly some other volatile organic compounds that come from the combustion process. And so there’s more contaminants produced the gas cooking than the other ways. So the hot electric element is sort of halfway in between it. We’re not burning anything anymore. So we don’t actually produce any water vapor or oxides of nitrogen, but you never can get those heating elements so clean that they don’t admit some particles, and the particle emission is not as high as burning the natural gas, but there’s still plenty of small particles emitted when you use electric cooking. And finally the induction cooktop because effectively there isn’t something that’s super duper hot. You need heat to volatilize things to create the particles, it creates by far the least particles. It doesn’t create any water vapor, no oxides of nitrogen. So if you’re looking to cook in a healthy way that isn’t healthy because the food you’re cooking is healthy, but because you’re not putting contaminants in the air, an induction cooked up is definitely the way to go in all our testing and testing that other people have done, Induction cooking is definitely the cleanest. There is one other thing to think about though, and that is the oven and we don’t really have induction ovens per se, right? They usually either electric or gas and again, you sort of have the same breakdown where gas is going to produce the most particles and so on and, and the electric less so. They, they can be a little trickier when we’re thinking about venting. When we talk about the capture efficiency for hoods, we’re just looking at what happens on the cooktop. We’ve not looked at including in the rating what happens from the oven. And some of that is because the way the ovens are vented depends on a lot on the particular construction of the oven you’re using or the range that you’re using and where the hot air comes out. Sometimes it’s at the back, sometimes at the front, sometimes it’s a bit of both. And so it was sort of hard to standardize a way to think about capturing from the oven. But even if you’re not using the cooktop and you’re baking some bread or something, it’s still a good idea to turn on your exhaust hood because you’re still getting contaminants emitted into your kitchen. Maybe not as much as a very, very hot stir fry. Right? But they’re still there and you should still vent them. And maybe you just, you just leave it on low or something and do that. So it’s, it’s an important point to notice that, you know, when you’re cooking in the oven, things get emitted too, and the last thing I’ll say about this is sometimes in very, very fancy high end kitchens, you might have multiple ovens and maybe you have a cooktop with an oven underneath it with a hood over it. But on the wall next to it is a second oven. Well it’s not underneath the range hood anymore, but that’s okay because once again, turning your range hood on, it’s also ventilating the whole kitchen. Right. And it’s stopping the pollutants from traveling from your kitchen to other places in the home because as you exhaust out of the kitchen, the air has to come from somewhere and that airflow into the kitchen tends to control the transport of these contaminants around your house. And so even if what you’re doing isn’t directly under the hood, when you turn on the hood, you’re still sucking air out of the kitchen and ventilating the kitchen and moving those contaminants. It’s not as efficient as it is when it’s directly over the cook top, but it’s still something that’s worthwhile. And indeed, there are many other kitchen ventilation approaches that don’t use a range with per se. Right. Sometimes there’s just a fan in the wall or a fan in the ceiling that exhausts the whole room. And again, they work, they’re just not as efficient as a range hood and in order to get to the same levels of contaminants in the kitchen, if you just generally ventilating in the kitchen, you have to ventilate a lot more than if it’s just the range hood, and so those are less effective but it’s not like it has zero effect.

Kelly:                                  30:52                   Right. Great Point. Yeah. So thank you. There’s a lot of key takeaways here. I would say some of my top ones are number one, use your exhaust fan. Number two, vent it to the outside directly. And my number three is I should get an induction stove so I can make a bacon cheeseburger and call it healthy cooking.

Ian:                                    31:21                   I wouldn’t, I’m not sure I’m going to agree completely with your point number three about whether what you’re eating is healthy, but in terms of what you were emittnig and what you’re breathing. It might be slightly healthier. And, you know, I’m not against gas cooking, I cook with gas myself, right. But I use my range at a lot. And I understand that, that there are people that have, they love to cook and they have an affinity for using gas and I’m never going to tell them to not do it right. But I’m gonna tell them, you know, the air in your kitchen is going to have less contaminants if you use the induction, I mean I think my next cooktop will be induction even though I like to cook a lot.

Kelly:                                  32:03                   All right, good to know. So, we like to ask this, if we have you back on the podcast in five years, maybe 10 years, what will we be talking about then? Besides how awesome your induction cooktop is

Ian:                                    32:20                   I think we’ll be talking about a couple of things. I think that the design of range hoods is going to get better. And by that I mean we’ll get the same amount of the contaminants captured and exhausted from the kitchen at a lower air flow. And I like that because it means it’ll be quieter, which people are much more likely to use their hoods. And it means that if we move less air that’s less air we have to heat up or cool down, you know, that goes in and out of the house. And so that’s going to be something that I think we’re gonna see the range of manufacturers looking into. The next thing is, is, is automation, which is, you know, we made this point about range, that it only works if it’s turned on right. But once we have got good designs that capture well and arent noisy because they move less air or else theyre better aerodynamic designs, then I think we can move down the path of let’s automate these devices so they will sense that you’re cooking and turn on automatically and they’re likely to turn on at, at a low airflow and there’ll be a switch that you as the cook can still use. Like if you, if you start to burn something, you could turn it on to high. Right. But they’re gonna automatically operate. So it’s not dependent on, on the cook to turn it on. It’s going to be automatic. And the automation is an extension of, there are some high end hoods out now that have what I’ll call an emergency switch in them. If they get very, very hot, they’re intended to detect a cooktop fire and go into high speed. It’s a safety thing. And those controls strategies are going to get adapted to be more sensitive and use some different ways of sensing the cooking, not just the temperature of the air, but maybe some infrared sensing and things like that. And we’re gonna automate range hoods and I, and I think that sort of performance improvement and automation are going to be the two big changes that we see in sometime in the next five years. These things are going to become relatively mainstream.

Kelly:                                  34:25                   Okay. That sounds great. You did mention three things at first, do you have a third or are we going to have to wait and see?

Ian:                                    34:34                   There is a third one and this is something that may be a bit of a stretch and that is that there are some applications where people would like to recirculate. And the reason why I was gonna say it is third and then then I changed my mind is that I understand that with these devices you could certainly put in a good particle filter to move the particles. You could put some active charcoal carbon filters in there to remove some of the vcs, but youre still gonna have a hard time with removing the water vapor. Right. And that’s always gonna be an issue if you cook a lot, you know, and you don’t want condensation and we don’t want higher moisture levels in our homes. And it also has the issue of, it’s really relying on the homeowner to regularly change out all those filters. And from what we know from how people use their homes in particular, looking at how often people change the filters in the heating and cooling systems, we’re pretty sure we can’t rely on people to do that. So this, this is a third option and it’s being investigated mostly for like Super Duper, super tight homes where they want to keep the heat in. If you’re familiar with the, the passive house system where houses are very, very airtight and they are doing an amazing job of controlling all the heat flows. In the winter, they want to keep the cooking heat in the house as heat because they don’t want to turn on the heating system. And so they would like to have recirculating systems that allow them to do that. But I think there’s still, you know, a couple of really serious issues with those where I would be comfortable in recommending them. So they could be the third thing, and there’s certainly a bunch of work being done right now on how do we improve the filtration of these things. How good a filter do we need? And so on. But like I said, they have a couple of key drawbacks, which is they don’t remove the moisture and they do require a lot of maintenance. That means that- I won’t say they’re terrible, I’m just not their biggest fan.

Kelly:                                  36:41                   Right. That sounds great. So maybe we’ll put that on the 10 year horizon and we’ll check what they’ve got going on then

Ian:                                    36:49                   Maybe we’ll see. I just always prefer simpler things because they’re harder to break. Right. And you know, you want to buy something that’s gonna work for at least 10 years. And so the idea of, you know, robust things that don’t require you to maintain them all the time seem like they’re much, much more likely to be working in 10 years.

Kelly:                                  37:11                   That’s an excellent point and I think it is a good end note. So I want to thank you so much for your time today and for coming on the podcast and coordinating this remote recording with our team. Thank you so much Ian.

Ian:                                    37:27                   Well thank you Kelly. I’m happy to talk about these things as you can probably tell.

Kelly:                                  37:31                   Great. We’ll have you back on soon.

Ian:                                    37:35                   All right. Thanks, Kelly.

Kelly:                                  37:42                   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.

Bill Zoeller

Bill Zoeller is a Registered Architect and Senior Vice President with Steven Winter Associates. He has 33 years of experience in building design and construction, building science research, energy-efficiency, disaster-resistant construction, and building materials product development. Bill has specialized expertise in advanced and traditional materials; design to resist natural hazards; energy efficient building practices; and energy upgrades in historic buildings. He has participated in product development and marketing analysis work for major building material manufactures and has worked on hazards resistance research for HUD and FEMA. Bill leads SWA’s team of enclosure specialists which has over 50 years of combined experience in condition assessments, design consulting and construction administrative services, and has participated on projects ranging from historic museums with rare collection archives, to high-rise Passive House towers.

Critical to the make-up of a high-performance building, is a well-designed, carefully construction building enclosure. Thanks to advancements in building-science knowledge, building materials, and construction best practices, achieving a well-insulated, air-tight building envelope can be possible if executed correctly.

On this episode of Buildings and Beyond, we talk with SWA Senior VP and building enclosures expert, Bill Zoeller. Bill shares some strategies that professionals should consider when designing and constructing building enclosures and high-performance wall assemblies.

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: (00:14)
By focusing on efficiency, accessibility and health.

Robb: (00:18)
I’m Robb Aldrich.

Kelly: (00:19)
And I’m Kelly Westby.

Robb: (00:21)
This week I’m talking with Bill Zoeller who is a senior vice president here at Steven Winter Associates. He and I have worked together for almost almost 20 years now and it’s been observed by several people that Bill and I really don’t have many conversations. We have many more arguments, but I think we’re both very well behaved in this episode. We’re talking about high performance envelopes, specifically high performance walls. I mean designing building good envelopes has changed a lot over the past couple of decades. So we dig into this, the reasons for this a little bit and specifically talk about some high performance wall systems.

Robb: (01:03)
Thanks for being here, Bill.

Bill: (01:05)
Thanks Robb. My pleasure.

Robb: (01:07)
So I talked to you about doing an session on envelopes, a podcast episode on envelopes, which is a huge topic, but the way envelopes are designed and built now is so drastically different and continues to change a lot with new materials, with new techniques, new details. I wanted to dig into that topic a little bit and we ended up deciding to talk about walls because that’s what came up first because every building has walls. So big picture, why are envelopes and enclosures so different now?

Bill: (01:48)
Well, in order to look at why they’re different now, I think we need to look at the context of where they were and where they were is really the impetus for why they changed and where they were a bunch of years ago, let’s say 10, 15, 20 years ago. If someone was building your basic house pretty much anywhere in the country it was framed with two by four walls, add ore 13 bad insulation, jammed into the stud cavities without much care or Thought of how good or neat or quality the job was. Essentially no care at all to any sort of air sealing between the inside and the outside. So basically you had you know, a frame wall cavity with a little bit of insulation in it and a lot of air blowing through it. Well, it wasn’t very good. And when the energy codes changed to improve the performance,

Robb: (02:46)
Or actually came into being in lots of places

Bill: (02:49)
Or came into being in lots of places, they incorporated some attributes that caused some changes to occur. For instance if we have your basic r-13 wall with bad insulation and no air sealing capability, what you’ve got is a little bit of thermal insulation that’s stopping the flow of heat from inside to outside a little bit. But all the air is blowing around it. So even if I have installation in the cavities, the outside air is blowing through the insulation via infiltration and really bypassing the thermal installation altogether. Then, the building codes increased a little bit. And we ended up with two by six walls, r-19 or r-20 insulation in that same space. And we started to employ some air sealing measures. It became known that air infiltration into buildings was one of the largest causes of heat loss and comfort issues and so on in buildings. So the next reasonable response is, well, let’s tighten up the buildings.

Robb: (04:06)
But there wasn’t yet a durability concern.

Bill: (04:12)
The building science was not really a known quantity when we started to do that. You know, like anything else, when we start employing new measures and new aspects of anything, there’s always unintended consequences and we certainly found them. In this case, the unintended consequences have to do with the second law of thermal dynamics. And usually when I start this conversation, I start with the first law of thermodynamics, which is basically in a nutshell that energy can’t be created or destroyed. The reason I start with the first law is because I really want to talk about the second law, but if I do that, people always say, well, what the heck’s the first law? So we got that out of the way, right? And the second law of thermodynamics is really the main issue with high performance wall assemblies and why theyre causing problems and why they can cause problems. And that’s that it’s the law of entropy, which basically means that any system of energy in an isolated chamber, or setting, wants to morph towards basically chaos. So if I have heat on one side of the wall and cold on the other side of the wall, what the energy wants to do is basically equalize itself on either sides of the wall. So the heat’s going from hot to cold. So if I’m hot on the inside of the house, cold on the outside of the house, the heat wants to flow through that assembly to get to the outside. But in order for that to occur, I need to have energy. The energy wants to move from hot to cold. But the transfer of energy actually takes two forms of energy to occur In the case of these buildings, in the case with thsese walls. There’s mechanical energy and that’s the air movement, which aids drying and then there’s thermal energy which also aids drying. And if I am reducing the air flow and the energy flow through that wall system, I am decreasing the capability of that wall system to dry. That’s the new part.

Robb: (06:41)
Okay. All right. But it can go both ways. I mean, heat flow and energy flow can cause drying. It can also bring moisture into building cavities. It goes both ways, but I think it’s like, you know, 20, 30, whatever, long time ago, buildings were solely heat that even if moisture got brought into the wall cavity, it dried out pretty quickly because there was just so much air flow and heat flow.

Bill: (07:07)
That’s absolutely correct. Right. So now we’ve, we’ve diminished the capability of the drying, but we didn’t diminish the capability of the wetting. It’s still raining on the outside of the building. We still have our cladding dealing with the bulk water as the water flows down in the siding of the building, probably leaks a little bit into the walls because you know, walls aren’t perfect. And we’ve got the other issue of the air infiltration from the inside of the building carrying the relatively warmer moisture moister air into the wall cavity, finding something cold and condensation on it. So the air infiltration for the inside can cause condensation within the cavity. So now we’ve set up a little problem for ourselves. We’ve, we’ve increased the thermal insulation and the air tightness a little bit, but we haven’t really dealt with the moisture management part. We’ve taken the wetting and the drying and pushed it a little bit out of balance. And when we push it a little bit out of balance, we ended up with dampness inside our walls and we get mold and decay and all kinds of bad stuff.

Robb: (08:23)
So to keep water out?

Bill: (08:25)
Keep water out. Water is the enemy. Bulk water management is one thing.

Robb: (08:31)
Siding, flashing, secondary drainage plains?

Bill: (08:36)
Well, you know, water resistant barriers need to be excuse me, adequate. They’re never going to be perfect. So we have to understand that they’re not going to be perfect. But they have to be well detailed. They have to be proper materials. The water has to be able to go some place. We see a lot of designs for wall assemblies where they look pretty good if you look at a basic section. But if you look at the details, the water really has no place to go. You know, you’re kind of trapped. There’s no capillary breaks. There’s that kind of an item.

Robb: (09:10)
So let me back up a little bit here. So my perhaps simplistic take is that most walls have some kind of siding. The siding should keep most of the water out. If water happens to get behind the siding, through some defect in construction, or just crazy horizontal rain or up flow rain or you know, then there should be some kind of house wrap or building paper or something that the water can’t get through. Which people often call it the drainage plane. I like to call the secondary drainage plane.

Bill: (09:51)
Well in code speak that’s the weather resistant barrier. And if I’m cladding my house in shingles or clapboard or something else, all that material overlaps and it’s got gaps in joints and you’re going to get wind driven rain in there and there’s going to be pressure differentials on the lease side of the house or the windward side of the house, depending on what the weather’s doing, the water’s going to get back there. So it needs a place to, you know, to go to, whether it’s a secondary drainage plane or a weather resistant barrier, it’s all that’s all about bulk water management. That’s what happens in the outside of the building.

Robb: (10:29)
Gotcha. And those come in the form of like in frame construction, which is, you know, very common at least in residential, house wrap building paper or like zip, I see more and more zip walls going up, which has the weather resistant barrier on the face of OSB. Are all those created equal, all those more or less the same function?

Bill: (10:56)
Well, no. They’re all different. And you know, it depends on the overall assembly of, of the wall as to which is going to work the best. If you look at the old school stuff you know, good old 15 pound building felt, that was in essence the weather resistant barrier. And no way was it an air barrier. You can’t tape it, you can’t glue it, you know, like originally when the house wraps came out, they were lapped six inches according to the manufacturer and stapled. And it’s like, Hey, this is an air infiltration barrier, isn’t it great? Well, you know, if I take a one by one sample and test it in the laboratory, it’ll come out as a rated air infiltration barrier. If I put it in a house and I don’t bother doing anything with the seams and joints, it’s not an air barrier of anything. It’s just for leaks. It’s like a bucket with holes in it. Even though the plastic bucket is made out of material, it’s got holes in it. So it’s not going to do any good in terms of holding water.

Robb: (11:57)
And this is, I think one of the newer things, because 10-20 years ago when people came out with tapes that tape all the seams of your house wrap of your building paper of your zip sheathing then, you know, nobody trusted that those tapes would hold up over decades. And you know, they would decompose, the adhesive would break down and they’d fall off and then you’d get leaks, air leaks, water leaks, et cetera. I mean, do you agree? I mean, that seems like very new.

Bill: (12:25)
Well, those concerns were well founded. They didn’t work. You know, in terms of longterm durability, there was issues.

Robb: (12:35)
Okay, but now?

Bill: (12:35)
Well there’s different materials on the market. Tapes are a lot better Generally. Some are still better than others, but you can get tapes and systems that absolutely work to air seal your building on the outside. And, and truly that’s the place you should air seal your building on the exterior sheathing plane. You want to air seal where the air movement is, the air movements on the outside, not the inside. So that’s your first line of defense. That’s where it ought to go.

Robb: (13:04)
Alright. So keep the water out. Flashing details, you know, more important now than they ever were.

Bill: (13:11)
Yeah. Because the drying capabilities lower.

Robb: (13:13)
Because there’s low drying, and getting that weather resistant barrier, seamless, really impervious, is the way to go. You got to do it in a high performance wall.

Bill: (13:27)
You have to do it in a high performance wall. A little bit of a problem in that barrier can cause big problems in the, in the overall wall assembly.

Robb: (13:35)
So r-value. Higher our values. How do you do that in the best way? And again, in a framed wall now?

Bill: (13:41)
Well there’s different approaches. There’s obviously the standard traditional way, is to fill the cavity with fiberglass insulation. That’s what we used to do. That works up to a certain point. It still keeps a lot of the thermal bridges in the form of the wood studs, for example, in place. So where the wood studs are, I don’t have any installation at all. I have wood studs.

Robb: (14:02)
R-3 or whatever. Less than five.

Bill: (14:06)
So really now the more effective approaches utilize continuous exterior insulation. A layer of insulation that basically blankets the entire building around the exterior, covering all the thermal bridges. So that for as an example, I’ll have a and r-5 or r-6 or an r-7 continuous around the entire building envelope. That’ll be directly integrated with my air sealing. Then if I put cavity insulation in place the cavity insulation will actually be effective to its rated value or close to it, because the thermal bridges essentially been defeated.

Robb: (14:46)
Okay. So continuous installation is the way to go, you think?

Bill: (14:50)
It’s one of the better approaches. Again, there’s different approaches, but that absolutely is a preferred approach, I’ll call it.

Robb: (14:59)
And the material? Foam is what I see mostly. Rigid foam?

Bill: (15:05)
Rigid foam works. You know, if you use rigid foam, you could do your air barrier on this and the weather resistant barrier that we talked about before. The secondary drainage plane as we called it, on the surface of the foam. There’s other materials I could use like mineral wool, rigid mineral wool for continuous installation on the exterior, in which case I have to use the sheathing below it, underneath it, for the weather resistant barrier and my air ceiling barrier, because the mineral wool is not an air barrier. The cladding or siding needs to be installed on furring strips of some sort, because you can’t nail directly through the mineral wool because it’s a compressible material, but it’s drainable. So you know, if you’re going to do a rain screen, which basically puts a gap between the sheathing and the back of the cladding as a siding approach, then the mineral wool works just fine.

Robb: (16:08)
Rainscreen is any gap? I mean, furring strips constitute a rain screen?

Bill: (16:12)
Well, you could do a rain screen multiple different ways. Basically, it’s an air gap or a capillary break between the back of the sheathing and whatever the sheathing is attached to. So if I have a drainable insulation, like mineral wool, the back of the cladding, whether it’s clapboard or something else, will be spaced out at least typically a quarter of an inch from the face of the insulation, so that if water gets back there, it’s got a place to drain. It doesn’t cling to the back of the installations, there’s a little air movement up in there. And we talked about, you know, the second law of thermodynamics before, if I’ve got some air movement, I’ve got some higher drying capability. So I’m introducing some drying capability within that wall cavity.

Robb: (17:04)
So the double wall systems, you know, dub two, 10 inches, 12inches, packed with cellulose.

Bill: (17:08)
What you have is basically two parallel stud walls separated by a few inches. So the total dimension of the walls, as you said, is 10, 11, or 12 inches. Then the whole thing is, is packed with dry blown-in, dense pack cellulose. That’s a lot of insulation, you know, at at 3.2 inches, r-3.2 or 4 per inch or whatever, times 10 inches, you know, r-30 r-30+. So what you’ve got there is a whole lot of thermal insulation. So you’re stopping the energy heat flow, and you’re getting some air sealing, but it’s not a complete vapor permeable solution. So that if there are air leaks, which there will be a little bit, there always are. Interior, more moisture ladened air can get into that wall system, find its way to the exterior sheathing and potentially condense, because the exterior sheathing does not have the continuous insulation we talked about. So it’ll be colder. And if it’s colder and my interior air gets to it, the relative humidity goes from 50% to 100%, because the air goes from 70 degrees to 10 degrees. I can get some condensation issues, some dewpoint problems and end up with a big problem. So if you are going to do the double stud wall, there are some products in the market that are highly recommended to make it safe generically called Smart Vapor retarders that you would want to install on the inside of the wall behind your drywall to make that type of a wall system basically a safe wall system. Without that, it’s potentially problematic.

Robb: (19:05)
And a rainscreen or vented siding is even more.

Bill: (19:08)
In combination with the vented siding, the rain screen. Yeah. You know, we talked about the continuous insulation a little bit before. And what the continuous installation also does, just to sort of amplify that a little bit, is that it’ll take that same exterior sheathing and raise the temperature of it, because you’re putting your continuous thermal barrier between the outside weather and the exterior sheathing so that the temperature of that sheathing remains above the dewpoint under all design conditions. So, even if I have air leakage into the cavity with say, you know, two inches of xps or poly ISO insulation and say in r-19 or r-20, in a two by six cavity in most climate zones in the U.S., that’ll be a safe wall, because the sheathing stays above the dewpoint. So any air that leaks into that assembly still will not condense.

Robb: (20:05)
It makes sense. I mean, it all makes sense. I see people wanting to stay away from petrochemicals and most of the rigid installation, continuous insulation is foam. But you said there are alternatives. There’s some mineral wool or there’s some cellulose based rigid insulation.

Bill: (20:22)
There’s some European type products that are finding their way into the U.S. Market slowly that are essentially wood based, but they perform more or less like a mineral wool, rigid installation and they have the same drawbacks. You know, You don’t want to nail directly to them. You want to provide a capillary break, you want to give them a chance to drain behind your cladding and so on. But there’s plenty of options.

Robb: (20:45)
And more and more. It’s hard to keep up with it all, but more options.

Bill: (20:54)
More options is good, but includes more confusion on the part of the designers and builders that are using them. Because if there’s a lack of basic understanding of some of the building science involved they’re relying on your particular marketing information, which is always going to be a little bit incomplete because it’s designed to sell stuff. You know, let’s be honest.

Robb: (21:21)
Yeah, definitely. All right. Switching gears a little bit, masonry, what’s different in masonry?

Bill: (21:30)
Well, let’s start with what’s the same in Masonry? And in masonry, if we’re talking about new construction, you really want to employ the same strategies you’re doing in frame construction and that’s the continuous exterior insulation barrier outside the whole thing, jacket the whole darn thing. And some sort of an insulation jacket, be it xps, mineral wool or poly ISO, or something else, to the point where the inside surfaces of the masonry, if it’s a CMU block and plank building for instance, stays above that dewpoint. Same rules apply. If I don’t have enough continuous insulation on the outside, and my CMU backing gets below the dewpoint, my warm interior air at 50% relative humidity can get in there, contact that masonry, get down to 50 degrees, and 100% relative humidity, and I have a moisture problem. So there it’s the same. In terms of continuous air barriers and weather resistive barriers, the place to put that typically is on the direct face of the concrete masonry units. The CMU- I’m sorry for using the jargon, I get carried away sometimes. You know, that kind of a system you’ll see with either a brick veneer exterior, we’re seeing a lot more rainscreen cladding systems, metal panel systems, terracotta panel systems, we’ll employ that sort of a strategy. So we’re seeing a lot of different approaches that actually work now that the building science is a little bit better understood. And there’s more products to provide more variation that are, you know, desired by designers.

Robb: (23:21)
So the weather resistant barrier, on the outside of the masonry, and most if not all the insulation outside of that.

Bill: (23:30)
generally that’s going to be a higher performing approach. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you could, you could come in with some like age still framing inside your concrete block with some, you know, essentially auxiliary installation material, to get a boost in r-value or meet energy code or whatever you’re going to do with it. But it’s really that outside continuous insulation that’s performing most of the work.

Robb: (23:53)
And this is typical in the northeast for multifamily, new construction, some commericial?

Bill: (23:59)
In urban locations, yeah.

Robb: (24:00)
And then in the rest of the country is, I mean, we’ve been talking about colder climates generally, does the same hold true? I mean, the r-values are lower required by code as you get further south, as you get warmer. I mean, are there different challenges, similar challenges?

Bill: (24:20)
Well, the challenges are, are, are different all over. In general, the masonry buildings are going to be safer in terms of moisture performance cause they’re a little bit more idiot proof. You know, if we look at frame construction, when you get down into the south, the rules are a little different there. If I’ve got a cooling dominated climate, and the interior temperature is kept at say 70 degrees, and it’s 95 degrees and you know, 80% relative humidity outside, and I have any moisture drive at all, the thermal dynamics doesn’t change. It’s just that the flow of energy is now different, and it wants to flow from hot to cold. So in that case, it’s outside to inside. So now if I have air leaks, I’m drawing the exterior of the hot sticky air through that wall assembly to the inside. And if I have a vapor retarder on the inside, even if it’s by accident, like vinyl wallpaper, I have a big problem because that’s where the moisture stops. I’ll get condensation, I’ll get mold, I’ll have all sorts of problems. So it really is climate specific, how you deal with it. When you’re looking at climates in between, that can be both, say Washington DC, you know, it can get New York cold or it can get Florida hot. So, you know, you really have to understand the dynamics in designing high-performance wall systems, especially in those mixed climates.

Robb: (25:47)
In Phoenix, the risks are lower, I imagine.

Bill: (25:51)
In Phoenix or you know, most of California, the risks are lower because yeah, the enemy is water, and there’s just less of it in the air. So it tends to not be as much of a problem.

Robb: (26:04)
So if your brother called you up, said he’s building a new house and asked you what kind of wall he should use in a single family home in Connecticut, in New York. What would you tell him?

Bill: (26:15)
I just had this conversation with my brother yesterday. No, I didn’t. But I mean, you know, in a typical northeastern climate zone five scenario, likely be a two by six wall, it could be maybe 2×4 wall. Builders don’t want to do that anymore, but there’s nothing wrong with it because structurally it’s fine. And if I can get my continuous insulation on the outside, do my air barriers out there, do a continuous, r-15 on the outside, which is, you know, two and a half inches of XPM of poly ISO, three inches of xps and do an r-13 bat or an r-15 bat, that’s an r-30 wall and a two by four wall. Nothing wrong with that. So if you’re looking at low cost, high performance, that is probably a really good approach. A lot of builders will just say, I’m not going to do two by fours because blah, blah, blah. So they want to do two by six. And I’m like, okay, well then do you know r-10 continuous outside and then do r-19 batts. You want to make sure that the continuous insulation stays within a fairly high ratio of the total installation. You know, like 33% probably is a minimum for condensation control. So that’s, you know, basically a rule of thumb. You’d want to look at the actual attributes and parameters of your materials before making that decision. But that’s a pretty good rule of thumb to start with for basic planning purposes.

Robb: (27:48)
Okay. And further south, is there a line where continuous is really kind of not really required? I mean, in Georgia, do you really need continuous insulation? The code doesnt require it?

Bill: (28:01)
No, the code doesn’t require it. And you know, again, if you don’t do the continuous installation, you’re still gonna have the thermal breaks. The thermal bridges rather, but the thermal bridges will be less important because the temperature differential is less. If I’m 70 degrees on the inside, 90 degrees on the outside, that’s a Delta t of 20 degrees, not a big deal. In New York, if I’m 70 degrees on the inside and 10 degrees on the outside, that’s a 60 degree temperature differential three. So, you know, the, the thermal drive is three times greater, but you’re still not getting the complete performance package. If you do continuous insulation, you know, again, you gotta pay attention a little bit differently to the dynamics, but you can still do high performance wall. You could do a high performance wall without the continuous easier in the south than you can in the north.

Robb: (29:00)
Yup. Okay. All right. So I mean, keep the weather out is number one. Bulk water management, siding, drainage, probably number one. Air tightness, probably number two.

Bill: (29:07)
Agreed.

Robb: (29:12)
And then from there it’s designing for forgiveability or if something does go wrong, you’d get a little bit of leakage or you get a little bit of water leak.

Bill: (29:32)
Yeah. it’s understanding what the vapor control issues are. Dewpoint control, Condensation Control, vapor dynamics, and it all changes a little bit based on how much r-value you put in because of that very unforgiving second law of thermodynamics.

Robb: (29:52)
Alright, so Okay. If we talk about this again in five years, what are we going to be talking about? Any new systems you think new systems, new products?

Bill: (30:01)
Well, the physics will not change. I can Pretty much guarantee that. There’s always going to be new systems on the market introduced about half of which will make it, half of which will make it, half of which won’t, and 10 or 20%, that’ll be pretty good. The other 30% that make it, that aren’t pretty good, will make it on behalf of their marketing strength, but that’s okay too. I don’t see anything really new and upcoming that’s going to be earth shattering. There’s a lot of stuff that people always think is going to be, you know, we saw, you know, panelized construction, sip construction and all that kind of type of product. They’re fine. You know, you just have to understand how they work and where are they working, and what to avoid in terms of problems.

Robb: (30:54)
But they haven’t taken over the world.

Bill: (30:55)
Yeah, yeah. No, they’re, you know, the 2% market share or whatever it is and they’ve been around for a while so they haven’t, you know, there’s a reason they haven’t taken over the world. You know, but they’re perfectly fine product and perfectly acceptable for use in modern buildings. Whether something new comes along that, you know, usurps, all of that, you know, that’s crystal ball time. I don’t see it right now.

Robb: (31:17)
All right. Awesome. Thanks very much.

Bill: (31:22)
Hey, thanks for having me.

Speaker 2: (31:27)
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 in 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.