Buildings + Beyond Podcast

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.

Episode Guests: 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.

High Performance Walls Guide

Foundation Waterproofing 101

Foundation Waterproofing – Proper Installation and What NOT to do!

Reducing Air Leaks in Multifamily Buildings (and why you should care)

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

Kitchen Ventilation with Iain Walker

Guest: Dr. Iain Walker from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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Kelly:                                  00:01                   Welcome to buildings and beyond

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

Kelly:                                  00:14                   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.

Richard Faesy

Richard Faesy is a principal and co-founder of Energy Futures Group in Hinesburg, Vermont. With more than 30 years of experience in the clean energy industry working with hundreds of clients and programs throughout the U.S. and Canada, he is highly regarded as a national expert and reliable project manager. Richard helped create the national home energy rating industry, was the founding president of the board of the Northeast HERS Alliance and was a founding board member of the Residential Energy Services Network (RESNET), including a term as president. Richard was featured in a national Dateline/NBC story on energy efficiency and was awarded RESNET’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He currently works with clients in California, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont. Read more

The electrification of buildings has become a growing trend in both residential and commercial sectors. Consumers that combine energy efficiency measures with newer heat-pump technologies can reduce both their utility bills and their carbon emissions. In fact, those with low loads can even achieve net zero when renewables are applied.

To discuss the goals of electrification we called upon Richard Faesy, Principal and Co-Founder of Energy Futures Group. Richard shares his experience with electrification projects around the Northeast. He talks about how programs and policies are taking advantage of new heat pump technologies and renewable energy to help meet climate goals.

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 Robb Aldrich.

Kelly: (00:19)
And I’m Kelly Westby.

Robb: (00:22)
My guest this time is Richard Feasy, who is one of the principals and founders of Energy Futures Group Vermont, they focus on energy efficiency and renewable energy more on the program side, more on utility programs and policy side. And they’re really involved with a lot of kind of cutting edge program design all around the country, but mostly in the northeast. And we talked about a growing trend that many people I’m sure are seeing, of electrification. Trying to forego fossil fuels on site, you know, don’t have oil or gas or propane at a home, at a commercial building. Instead use cleaner grid electricity or onsite renewables, combined with newer and much better heat pump technologies. A lot of this is driven by carbon emissions. Utilities, states, and many programs have mandates to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and with cleaner grids with more renewables, using really efficient heat pump technologies, can make that a reality. So Richard and I talked about this quite a bit in the interest of brevity, we’re going to cut in when we’re talking about one of the programs in Vermont they’re working on, called zero energy now. Retrofitting existing homes around the state, combining efficiency measures, heat pumps and onsite PV to really get very close to zero energy .

Richard: (02:00)
So zero energy now program was one we were able to quickly design, gear up, rollout, in a limited period of time because there was a funding opportunity that came along and I’m a member of the Trade Association of the home performance contractors in Vermont called the building performance professionals association or BPPA. And BPPA is really the organization that represents the interests, and promotes the home performance industry in Vermont. There was some funding that was available from Green Mountain power, our largest utility here. And we went after it and want it to put in place and really to demonstrate that we can take existing older homes in Vermont and save 80 to 90% of their total energy use through those three elements, weatherization, heat pumps and, and PV. There were a couple of homes as well that incorporated some biomass and wood, either pellet or wood stoves as well too, which we consider renewable. But we had some pretty impressive results in less than one year, to get everything up and designed and recruit and train contractors, open the door, roll it out, complete the projects. We got approval in February of 2016, and we had to have the projects done by the end of that year. So we really had sort of a nine or ten months to get it all going. And we completed 22 projects that that will save, We’re in the process of doing the analysis and going back and looking at what they actually use now that we’ve got a couple of winters under our belt, but based on the modeling and we had trued the models up with actual field consumption, but were looking at about 79% total energy savings on average for these homes. So that’s significant.

Robb: (04:36)
Is that site energy?

Richard: (04:42)
Yeah. So you know, if you look at source energy, there’s some significant impacts there, saving that electricity at the source. But that would be customer site energy. And we actually are doing some analysis right now, going in and pulling the fuel records from these homes. The first one that we looked at, actually they saved more than 90% of their total energy. These people were generally true believers. They wanted to get off fossil fuel. And they’re the great customers to have, but this particular home that we just looked at, is probably 20 years old, 25 years old, I forget exactly when it was built, but we did a $10,000 weatherization job. So not building out walls and replacing windows, but really sort of basement, attic, air ceiling, hitting the high points and then put in a couple of cold climate air source heat pumps, and PV on the roof. And actually overloaded the PV on the roof because they wanted to also buy an electric car, which they have in the meantime. And so they’ve really sort of walked the walk in terms of getting off of fossil fuel. This is just one of 22 homes we did in the first year. In the second year we did another 15. So we’ve got these 35 homes out there, existing Vermont homes that range from 150 years old to 10 or 20 years old that are really saving a significant amount of fossil fuel through the electrification pathway.

Robb: (06:34)
And the total cost to get there, I think I saw was somewhere in the forty thousands?

Richard: (06:39)
Yeah, on average, while we had some projects that were more, some that were less, on average, it was about $40,000 package to do these homes. So that would be eight or ten thousand for the weatherization work. And it would be about $10,000 again for the heat pumps and then about $20,000 for the solar PV, but the resulting savings, the dollar savings for looking at the oil, propane, electricity that they were using at the time, ended up being about a $3,000 a year savings. And so we’re fortunate enough in Vermont to have some good financing programs that are available, some low interest rate financing for these kinds of types of projects from a couple of credit unions. And you looked at, while we weren’t necessarily asking people to use any one particular source of funding for these, some people would pull from their savings, but others would, a number of them would use the heat saver loan, which is what this is called. The energy savings, the $3,000 a year energy savings were in, in almost all cases, more than what the annual loan payments would cost. So even though these were $40,000 packages, the savings would offset that cost.

Robb: (08:25)
Wow. Yeah. I mean, a lot of deep energy retrofits, you know, the costs start at six figures to really, you know, take old, crappy walls and make them R-40 and replace all the windows with triple pane windows, which was all good stuff, but very expensive. So this is a lower cost way to get close to zero. I wonder, have you guys looked at comfort and these homes? Is that part of the evaluation?

Richard: (08:53)
That is part of the evaluation that we’re going through now. Earlier this week we were looking at the set of questions that we’d go back to the homeowners with. So we wanted to know exactly, you know, how is their experience, what’s their experience like living in these homes, are they more comfortable? Cause most of them, were homes that people had lived in before. Some of them they had recently bought them and wanted to do something about it. And we’ve got a little video online that actually is one of the participants who’s a young farmer and they bought an existing home, they’d been there for a while and they wanted to sort of move off of fossil fuels. And so most of these people probably have some experience before and after the weatherization work, but part of the evaluation, we’ll tease that out.

Robb: (09:57)
Yeah. And I’m trying not to get too far into the weeds, but heat pump technology’s come a long ways, but I still see missed applications where the wrong system is installed in the wrong place and people are unhappy or uncomfortable with the results. So it’s something you’ve got to be careful of.

Richard: (10:19)
It does blow air around. So yeah, there are those potential comfort issues if you don’t get it right. And so you know, addressing the weatherization component is important. So we want to make sure that that was part of any picture going forward. But really what’s enabled us to do what we’re doing here is the fact, it’s a couple things. We’ve certainly learned how to weatherize buildings, and we’ve become more adept and efficient at doing that over the last number of decades. But the heat pump technology is, as you alluded to earlier, has really enabled us to apply electric heat in cold climates. We’ve got, and, I personally have a couple of couple of heat pumps at home and see them operating down to 20, below zero. Actually we have them in our office as well too. And, last winter we had a string of days here that hit 20 below, and they continue to chug along. They’re not as efficient, certainly as they are at warmer temperatures, but they do work and it’s not electric resistance heat even, you know, they’re not getting the best COPs, but it’s certainly better than a COP of one. So anyhow, so the heat pump technology has really enabled us to this, and the cost of solar has come down. And we’ve historically had some really beneficial net metering rules and incentives. Those are changing a little bit as the market’s maturing, but the price of solar is really competitive with electricity. So having technology that works in our climate and then is affordable allows us to package these elements together.

Robb: (12:24)
And you mentioned your office, your office is an almost net zero energy, all electric, new construction commercial building.

Richard: (12:33)
Yes, it is. Actually half of it is 150 year old farmhouse that we did a deep energy retrofit on, on that. It and then we doubled the square footage and, and that’s, that’s new construction. But we’ve got our, our 60 ceiling, our 40 walls, triple glazed windows. Good, good insulation around the slab and one part of it, the base in the other and really passive house tightness levels of, of air tightness with, with heat recovery ventilation. But, and we’ve got only heat pumps in here to provide heating cooling. So we’re 100% electric.

Richard: (13:17)
We snubbed the gas line that runs along out underneath the sidewalk out front so we don’t have to pay that monthly gas fee. And we needed to have electricity anyhow. And you know, it’s been almost at net zero, were 500 kilowatt hours short and we’ve discovered what’s going on and we are taking measures to change that and we expect we’ll have excess electricity next year as a result of that.

Robb: (13:53)
Gotcha. Yeah. You’re revamping the heat pumps system, I think you mentioned?

Richard: (13:56)
Yeah, we are. We discovered through a extensive monitoring of our two multi zone systems that a combination of them being oversized, and the fact that the multi zone systems in a tight high performance building don’t really, it’s a challenge with it turning down. It basically doesn’t turn down to meet the low loads of the building. So there’s a lot of cycling on and off and that’s really driven the performance of the, of the multi zone systems down. We are replacing the two outdoor multi site phone compressors with five individual compressors to drive each of the five indoor heads which will allow us better control and the ability to turn each of those down too much, much lower levels. So, we’re expecting to see a significant bump up in our annual COP and performance system over the next year. In fact, I just this morning scheduled the swap out happening beginning of February. So we will be monitoring these for the rest of the winter after they’d go in on February 6th and seventh. And so it will be interesting to see the comparison sort of before and after on a, on a per degree day basis, but our expectation and, and the anecdotal experience from others is that, that having the, the one to one units is going to improve the performance of what we see here.

Robb: (15:39)
And people like you are letting other people learn. I mean you’re learning the hard way. And heat pump manufacturers now are acknowledging that these multi zone multi split heat pumps are probably not appropriate for a very low load buildings. It all depends on the application

Richard: (16:03)
Yeah. Well, you know, I believe that that the manufacturer we worked with, I don’t know whether we named names here or not, but they I know that they’ve been aware of these issues for a while and, and it was really encouraging to, to see just last week coming out with a national bulletin going to all their contractors basically acknowledges this issue. And provide some guidance based on our experience and others about how to design, select, install and control these heat pump systems in low load buildings. So that’s, that was really encouraging to see that response and, and acknowledgement that this is an issue and providing some solutions for others going forward. So yeah, we feel a little bit like the Guinea pig, but that’s okay. I mean we’re, in it for, for trying to figure out how this works so we can let others benefit from that and, and not make the same mistakes going forward.

Robb: (17:06)
Excellent. So this kind of new construction or, or dramatic gut rehab, I guess in the case of your office building, that’s something that I personally see that, you know, going all electric and new construction, very efficient, It’s almost a no brainer in a lot of building types. For a residential or some commercial. In my experience, if you can get the loads really low, then he pump technologies are much easier to employ and implement. Do you see that trend in programs? I’m not seeing it as much as I would like, I think.

Richard: (17:49)
Well one of the projects that we’ve been working on recently too, is helping the state of Vermont update the residential building energy standards, basically the statewide energy code on the residential side and also the commercial building energy standards. So RBs and CBs, but our energy codes are being updated. They’ll go into effect a year from now. After that there’s sort of transition period over 2019 and, and training and well W we’re about to go through the rulemaking process and then there’s, we’ll, we’ll be training, and support materials that follow that with the implementation date January of 2020. But we’ve, we’ve had a lot of conversation and a stakeholder group advisory group meeting and discussion about where electrification fits into that. And there’s some tensions going on there, but generally the industry sees this exactly as you do, Robb. You know, it’s sort of the leading builders and developers and, and, and actually some of our affordable housing entities here who are looking at reducing operating costs further for their tenants buildings. As we bring the loads down, there’s a great match with heat pumps. It’s a technology that works well and it meets our state goals of 90% renewable energy by 2050 is sort of the overriding goal that Vermont’s striving for. But but the tension that I mentioned is that at the same time we have the state regulators and the those that are overseeing state policy, concerned about winter peak issues. And so how do we mitigate this, driving electric interest and drive towards electrification with this issue I mentioned before about needing to make sure that we have enough electric supply to, to meet shift our electric peaks from sort of balanced in Vermont, at least between summer and winter. We had historically been a winter peaking system, but we got most everybody off electric heat. And now that’s sort of coming around again and how do we address that? What are the appropriate resources, renewable resources to meet those needs. So that’s sort of the challenge and, and the tension that’s, that’s going on. You know, in some cases, almost in different sides of the same organization or you know, they’re out there trying to do electric planning and advocacy for getting us towards renewables at the same time.

Robb: (21:02)
That’s tricky. No easy answers I don’t think on that one.

Richard: (21:24)
No. Although, you know, so we, we some of the solutions could, could be around utility scale storage and, and or you know, or distributed Stuart’s storage as, as, as well. So as we see the price of batteries coming down, which, which it has rapidly, are there opportunities for us to have a container size batteries that that store renewably generated electricity from PV or wind during the day? Actually wind is a different issue cause A lot of times it’ll blow at night as well too, but at least we’ve got a lot of PV resources that don’t meet that nighttime heating demand and could storage be a part of that solution? I’d like to think that it is, and we need to get our, our, our incentives right. Or really our rates designed right so that we encourage that to happen. And that’s going to that’s going to help move things in that direction and and try to head off the peak issues. Avoid turning on those dirty peaker plants at night when it’s coldest out and people’s heat pumps and electric heater are all turning on.

Robb: (22:29)
Interesting. So looking ahead, is that one of the things you think we’ll see or you hope we’ll see.? Is just evolving rate design to make all aspects of this more practical and more palatable?

Richard: (22:45)
Yeah I think like a lot of things, it just the regulation to some extent sort of trails behind the innovators and, and the trends in the market that, you know, more market team sense tends to respond quicker than the policy and the regulatory environment does. And I know there’s, there’s a lot of conversation, at least here and I know elsewhere as well, at least in the northeast and the region about storage, as we the sort of overarching overriding goals that most of the northeastern states have, is some large percentage of the electric grid being renewable going forward. And so how do we get there and meet those goals? And I think that there need to be some signals to the market that support those sort of higher level policies. And a lot of that is, is going to be through rates and providing incentives to, to just, I mean, the reason that we have so much solar in certain states and not others is because of a net metering and feed in tariff incentives. And you know, so there’s policy and there’s dollars that went along with that policy to drive those market decisions that that market then responds to those situations that are put into place. But on the storage, I think it’s the same case, if we were able to value the time of day in the, in the rate design, you and you, and you had to you know, you were basically incentivized for not using electricity during peak times. There, there would be some, some more incentives for putting storage in place or for the market to come forward with storage solutions that would be cheaper potentially, Or you have incentives to, to store and use your own onsite electricity rather than relying on, on more expensive, dirtier electricity at peak times from the grid. Yeah.

Robb: (25:14)
And I know some different utilities from different regulators are playing with things like that. You’re probably more familiar with them than I am, but there’s definitely a move in that direction in A lot of places.

Richard: (25:30)
Yeah. There definitely is. California has been thinking about this for a while. They’re pretty aggressive in all of this. And they now have this time differentiated rate where at least every hour of the day, if not every 15 minutes of the day is valued differently. And, and so that, that gets pretty complicated. But as we get more sophisticated with, with controls and, and, and having algorithms that drive decisions, if they’re price signals that are built into rates that encourage people to use or not use electricity at different times of day, that that can get translated into real dollars. And it encourages people to make decisions that hopefully align with what the policies are in moving us towards renewables. So that any more than what we had at wanted to, you know, want it to focus on in terms of buildings and heat pumps. But really it’s all connected and it’s really interesting to see this push and pull between individual choices at the consumer level, with this technology that now works in our climates and it’s this cheap cheaper PV opportunities. And how that impacts our public policy and our rate making and our grid infrastructure. It’s all in flux and changing rapidly.

Robb: (27:15)
And it always will be. So aside from storage, are there other kinds of technologies you’re hoping for, you’re wishing for you see in the near future?

Richard: (27:33)
Well, you know, as we try to figure out where heat pumps fit into the building space as we’ve got these really lofty goals in our northeastern states around decarbonization and electrification and weaning us off of fossil fuels. I mean, there’s a tremendous amount of work to be done in the transportation sector, but we’re really focusing on the building sector here. We’ve got a lot of buildings in the northeast that burned fuels, fuel oil, propane. And if we can displace that with heat pumps there’ll be some significant savings there too. But we have yet to really figure out how to best integrate the heat pumps and the existing heating plants that are in our buildings, furnaces and boilers. And there’s some mixed messaging going out there about just run these things down to certain temperatures, you know, run the heat pump down to 25 degrees, then turn on your heating system, or just running during the shoulder seasons and run your traditional heating system the rest of the time. And then others saying, no, just set them and forget them, but set your thermostat a little lower and the central existing heating system will kick in to sort of fill in the gaps when the, when the heat pumps aren’t able to meet the load of the building. But we have yet to see sort of smart integrated controls that, that provide good economic outcomes for the, for the consumer. You know, at any given day it might be above 25 degrees, then below 25 degrees, are we expecting people to sort of turn their systems on and off? I don’t think so. And one size does not fit all, depending on whether you’re buying propane at 3 or 4 dollars a gallon. I saw more than $4 a gallon for small deliveries the other day, I was just outraged. So anyhow, with expensive propane and oil and relative to the electric rates, who’s sort of optimizing and at the same time we’ve got differing efficiencies, different COPs of the heat pumps based on the outdoor air temperature. So it’s going to cost more per btu delivered at colder temperatures from a heat pump than it is at warmer temperatures. How does that cost per delivered Btu compare to cost per delivered Btu from your furnace or boiler? We can’t expect consumers to make those choices. We need to figure out controls that optimize which systems to run and maybe prioritize the electric over the delivered fuels if there’s some sort of some sort of factor or value for carbon impact that somebody wants to layer in as well too. But we need to have better, smarter controls that will help optimize the performance of our systems, especially as we have multiple heating and potentially cooling systems in our buildings. And so I think that’s another area of opportunity that we really haven’t figured out yet.

Robb: (31:29)
And maintain comfort I would add.

Richard: (31:31)
And maintain comfort, you know, and that’s the bottom line. That’s one of the bottom lines to consumers, comfort and cost. So how do we deliver that in a way that’s simple and make sense and maybe it responds in real time to the cost of the fuels and the outdoor temperature, the efficiency of the system and signals. Anyway, there’s a lot of work to be done.

Robb: (32:00)
So where can people find out more about you and some of these programs? We can link on our on our show notes page. Your website is?

Richard: (32:11)
energyfuturesgroup.com. It’s a mouthful, but somebody already had efg.com.

Robb: (32:16)
All right. And you mentioned the video showing some of the zero energy now?

Richard: (32:35)
Yeah, our website does have some links to some of our projects. All of our projects on there. And there’s a page on the building. You can actually see our consumption in real time. Our engaged monitor feeds the data up to the web. And so there’s a link there. You can see how poorly it performs on a day like today where the snow is covering our solar panels, yet our heat pumps are on. But then in the summertime how much electricity kilowatt hours we’re banking waiting for the winter as we have no loads and lots of sun. Anyhow. energyfuturesgroup.com.

Robb: (33:23)
Excellent. I will provide links to all that. Well this is a lot, Richard. There’s lots going on, but thank you very much for, for joining us.

Richard: (33:31)
Good. Well, I appreciate the conversation. We’ve all got a lot of work to do and I think we still have a lot to learn.

Speaker 5: (33:43)
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 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.

The electrification of buildings has become a growing trend in both residential and commercial sectors. Consumers that combine energy efficiency measures with newer heat-pump technologies can reduce both their utility bills and their carbon emissions. In fact, those with low loads can even achieve net zero when renewables are applied.

To discuss the goals of electrification we called upon Richard Faesy, Principal and Co-Founder of Energy Futures Group. Richard shares his experience with electrification projects around the Northeast. He talks about how programs and policies are taking advantage of new heat pump technologies and renewable energy to help meet climate goals.

Episode Guests: Richard Faesy

Richard Faesy is a principal and co-founder of Energy Futures Group in Hinesburg, Vermont. With more than 30 years of experience in the clean energy industry working with hundreds of clients and programs throughout the U.S. and Canada, he is highly regarded as a national expert and reliable project manager. Richard helped create the national home energy rating industry, was the founding president of the board of the Northeast HERS Alliance and was a founding board member of the Residential Energy Services Network (RESNET), including a term as president. Richard was featured in a national Dateline/NBC story on energy efficiency and was awarded RESNET’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He currently works with clients in California, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont.

Energy Futures Group

EFG Zero-Energy Project

Building Performance Professionals Association (BPPA)

Vermont’s Zero Energy Now Program

Blog – Electrify Everything? (part 1/?)

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

Building Enclosures with Bill Zoeller

Guest: Bill Zoeller

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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 Robb Aldrich.

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

Robb:                                00:22                   My guest this time is Richard Feasy, who is one of the principals and founders of Energy Futures Group Vermont, they focus on energy efficiency and renewable energy more on the program side, more on utility programs and policy side. And they’re really involved with a lot of kind of cutting edge program design all around the country, but mostly in the northeast. And we talked about a growing trend that many people I’m sure are seeing, of electrification. Trying to forego fossil fuels on site, you know, don’t have oil or gas or propane at a home, at a commercial building. Instead use cleaner grid electricity or onsite renewables, combined with newer and much better heat pump technologies. A lot of this is driven by carbon emissions. Utilities, states, and many programs have mandates to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and with cleaner grids with more renewables, using really efficient heat pump technologies, can make that a reality. So Richard and I talked about this quite a bit in the interest of brevity, we’re going to cut in when we’re talking about one of the programs in Vermont they’re working on, called zero energy now. Retrofitting existing homes around the state, combining efficiency measures, heat pumps and onsite PV to really get very close to zero energy .

Richard:                            02:00                   So zero energy now program was one we were able to quickly design, gear up, rollout, in a limited period of time because there was a funding opportunity that came along and I’m a member of the Trade Association of the home performance contractors in Vermont called the building performance professionals association or BPPA. And BPPA is really the organization that represents the interests, and promotes the home performance industry in Vermont. There was some funding that was available from Green Mountain power, our largest utility here. And we went after it and want it to put in place and really to demonstrate that we can take existing older homes in Vermont and save 80 to 90% of their total energy use through those three elements, weatherization, heat pumps and, and PV. There were a couple of homes as well that incorporated some biomass and wood, either pellet or wood stoves as well too, which we consider renewable. But we had some pretty impressive results in less than one year, to get everything up and designed and recruit and train contractors, open the door, roll it out, complete the projects. We got approval in February of 2016, and we had to have the projects done by the end of that year. So we really had sort of a nine or ten months to get it all going. And we completed 22 projects that that will save, We’re in the process of doing the analysis and going back and looking at what they actually use now that we’ve got a couple of winters under our belt, but based on the modeling and we had trued the models up with actual field consumption, but were looking at about 79% total energy savings on average for these homes. So that’s significant.

Robb:                                04:36                   Is that site energy?

Richard:                            04:42                   Yeah. So you know, if you look at source energy, there’s some significant impacts there, saving that electricity at the source. But that would be customer site energy. And we actually are doing some analysis right now, going in and pulling the fuel records from these homes. The first one that we looked at, actually they saved more than 90% of their total energy. These people were generally true believers. They wanted to get off fossil fuel. And they’re the great customers to have, but this particular home that we just looked at, is probably 20 years old, 25 years old, I forget exactly when it was built, but we did a $10,000 weatherization job. So not building out walls and replacing windows, but really sort of basement, attic, air ceiling, hitting the high points and then put in a couple of cold climate air source heat pumps, and PV on the roof. And actually overloaded the PV on the roof because they wanted to also buy an electric car, which they have in the meantime. And so they’ve really sort of walked the walk in terms of getting off of fossil fuel. This is just one of 22 homes we did in the first year. In the second year we did another 15. So we’ve got these 35 homes out there, existing Vermont homes that range from 150 years old to 10 or 20 years old that are really saving a significant amount of fossil fuel through the electrification pathway.

Robb:                                06:34                   And the total cost to get there, I think I saw was somewhere in the forty thousands?

Richard:                            06:39                   Yeah, on average, while we had some projects that were more, some that were less, on average, it was about $40,000 package to do these homes. So that would be eight or ten thousand for the weatherization work. And it would be about $10,000 again for the heat pumps and then about $20,000 for the solar PV, but the resulting savings, the dollar savings for looking at the oil, propane, electricity that they were using at the time, ended up being about a $3,000 a year savings. And so we’re fortunate enough in Vermont to have some good financing programs that are available, some low interest rate financing for these kinds of types of projects from a couple of credit unions. And you looked at, while we weren’t necessarily asking people to use any one particular source of funding for these, some people would pull from their savings, but others would, a number of them would use the heat saver loan, which is what this is called. The energy savings, the $3,000 a year energy savings were in, in almost all cases, more than what the annual loan payments would cost. So even though these were $40,000 packages, the savings would offset that cost.

Robb:                                08:25                   Wow. Yeah. I mean, a lot of deep energy retrofits, you know, the costs start at six figures to really, you know, take old, crappy walls and make them R-40 and replace all the windows with triple pane windows, which was all good stuff, but very expensive. So this is a lower cost way to get close to zero. I wonder, have you guys looked at comfort and these homes? Is that part of the evaluation?

Richard:                            08:53                   That is part of the evaluation that we’re going through now. Earlier this week we were looking at the set of questions that we’d go back to the homeowners with. So we wanted to know exactly, you know, how is their experience, what’s their experience like living in these homes, are they more comfortable? Cause most of them, were homes that people had lived in before. Some of them they had recently bought them and wanted to do something about it. And we’ve got a little video online that actually is one of the participants who’s a young farmer and they bought an existing home, they’d been there for a while and they wanted to sort of move off of fossil fuels. And so most of these people probably have some experience before and after the weatherization work, but part of the evaluation, we’ll tease that out.

Robb:                                09:57                   Yeah. And I’m trying not to get too far into the weeds, but heat pump technology’s come a long ways, but I still see missed applications where the wrong system is installed in the wrong place and people are unhappy or uncomfortable with the results. So it’s something you’ve got to be careful of.

Richard:                            10:19                   It does blow air around. So yeah, there are those potential comfort issues if you don’t get it right. And so you know, addressing the weatherization component is important. So we want to make sure that that was part of any picture going forward. But really what’s enabled us to do what we’re doing here is the fact, it’s a couple things. We’ve certainly learned how to weatherize buildings, and we’ve become more adept and efficient at doing that over the last number of decades. But the heat pump technology is, as you alluded to earlier, has really enabled us to apply electric heat in cold climates. We’ve got, and, I personally have a couple of couple of heat pumps at home and see them operating down to 20, below zero. Actually we have them in our office as well too. And, last winter we had a string of days here that hit 20 below, and they continue to chug along. They’re not as efficient, certainly as they are at warmer temperatures, but they do work and it’s not electric resistance heat even, you know, they’re not getting the best COPs, but it’s certainly better than a COP of one. So anyhow, so the heat pump technology has really enabled us to this, and the cost of solar has come down. And we’ve historically had some really beneficial net metering rules and incentives. Those are changing a little bit as the market’s maturing, but the price of solar is really competitive with electricity. So having technology that works in our climate and then is affordable allows us to package these elements together.

Robb:                                12:24                   And you mentioned your office, your office is an almost net zero energy, all electric, new construction commercial building.

Richard:                            12:33                   Yes, it is. Actually half of it is 150 year old farmhouse that we did a deep energy retrofit on, on that. It and then we doubled the square footage and, and that’s, that’s new construction. But we’ve got our, our 60 ceiling, our 40 walls, triple glazed windows. Good, good insulation around the slab and one part of it, the base in the other and really passive house tightness levels of, of air tightness with, with heat recovery ventilation. But, and we’ve got only heat pumps in here to provide heating cooling. So we’re 100% electric.

Richard:                            13:17                   We snubbed the gas line that runs along out underneath the sidewalk out front so we don’t have to pay that monthly gas fee. And we needed to have electricity anyhow. And you know, it’s been almost at net zero, were 500 kilowatt hours short and we’ve discovered what’s going on and we are taking measures to change that and we expect we’ll have excess electricity next year as a result of that.

Robb:                                13:53                   Gotcha. Yeah. You’re revamping the heat pumps system, I think you mentioned?

Richard:                            13:56                   Yeah, we are. We discovered through a extensive monitoring of our two multi zone systems that a combination of them being oversized, and the fact that the multi zone systems in a tight high performance building don’t really, it’s a challenge with it turning down. It basically doesn’t turn down to meet the low loads of the building. So there’s a lot of cycling on and off and that’s really driven the performance of the, of the multi zone systems down. We are replacing the two outdoor multi site phone compressors with five individual compressors to drive each of the five indoor heads which will allow us better control and the ability to turn each of those down too much, much lower levels. So, we’re expecting to see a significant bump up in our annual COP and performance system over the next year. In fact, I just this morning scheduled the swap out happening beginning of February. So we will be monitoring these for the rest of the winter after they’d go in on February 6th and seventh. And so it will be interesting to see the comparison sort of before and after on a, on a per degree day basis, but our expectation and, and the anecdotal experience from others is that, that having the, the one to one units is going to improve the performance of what we see here.

Robb:                                15:39                   And people like you are letting other people learn. I mean you’re learning the hard way. And heat pump manufacturers now are acknowledging that these multi zone multi split heat pumps are probably not appropriate for a very low load buildings. It all depends on the application

Richard:                            16:03                   Yeah. Well, you know, I believe that that the manufacturer we worked with, I don’t know whether we named names here or not, but they I know that they’ve been aware of these issues for a while and, and it was really encouraging to, to see just last week coming out with a national bulletin going to all their contractors basically acknowledges this issue. And provide some guidance based on our experience and others about how to design, select, install and control these heat pump systems in low load buildings. So that’s, that was really encouraging to see that response and, and acknowledgement that this is an issue and providing some solutions for others going forward. So yeah, we feel a little bit like the Guinea pig, but that’s okay. I mean we’re, in it for, for trying to figure out how this works so we can let others benefit from that and, and not make the same mistakes going forward.

Robb:                                17:06                   Excellent. So this kind of new construction or, or dramatic gut rehab, I guess in the case of your office building, that’s something that I personally see that, you know, going all electric and new construction, very efficient, It’s almost a no brainer in a lot of building types. For a residential or some commercial. In my experience, if you can get the loads really low, then he pump technologies are much easier to employ and implement. Do you see that trend in programs? I’m not seeing it as much as I would like, I think.

Richard:                            17:49                   Well one of the projects that we’ve been working on recently too, is helping the state of Vermont update the residential building energy standards, basically the statewide energy code on the residential side and also the commercial building energy standards. So RBs and CBs, but our energy codes are being updated. They’ll go into effect a year from now. After that there’s sort of transition period over 2019 and, and training and well W we’re about to go through the rulemaking process and then there’s, we’ll, we’ll be training, and support materials that follow that with the implementation date January of 2020. But we’ve, we’ve had a lot of conversation and a stakeholder group advisory group meeting and discussion about where electrification fits into that. And there’s some tensions going on there, but generally the industry sees this exactly as you do, Robb. You know, it’s sort of the leading builders and developers and, and, and actually some of our affordable housing entities here who are looking at reducing operating costs further for their tenants buildings. As we bring the loads down, there’s a great match with heat pumps. It’s a technology that works well and it meets our state goals of 90% renewable energy by 2050 is sort of the overriding goal that Vermont’s striving for. But but the tension that I mentioned is that at the same time we have the state regulators and the those that are overseeing state policy, concerned about winter peak issues. And so how do we mitigate this, driving electric interest and drive towards electrification with this issue I mentioned before about needing to make sure that we have enough electric supply to, to meet shift our electric peaks from sort of balanced in Vermont, at least between summer and winter. We had historically been a winter peaking system, but we got most everybody off electric heat. And now that’s sort of coming around again and how do we address that? What are the appropriate resources, renewable resources to meet those needs. So that’s sort of the challenge and, and the tension that’s, that’s going on. You know, in some cases, almost in different sides of the same organization or you know, they’re out there trying to do electric planning and advocacy for getting us towards renewables at the same time.

Robb:                                21:02                   That’s tricky. No easy answers I don’t think on that one.

Richard:                            21:24                   No. Although, you know, so we, we some of the solutions could, could be around utility scale storage and, and or you know, or distributed Stuart’s storage as, as, as well. So as we see the price of batteries coming down, which, which it has rapidly, are there opportunities for us to have a container size batteries that that store renewably generated electricity from PV or wind during the day? Actually wind is a different issue cause A lot of times it’ll blow at night as well too, but at least we’ve got a lot of PV resources that don’t meet that nighttime heating demand and could storage be a part of that solution? I’d like to think that it is, and we need to get our, our, our incentives right. Or really our rates designed right so that we encourage that to happen. And that’s going to that’s going to help move things in that direction and and try to head off the peak issues. Avoid turning on those dirty peaker plants at night when it’s coldest out and people’s heat pumps and electric heater are all turning on.

Robb:                                22:29                   Interesting. So looking ahead, is that one of the things you think we’ll see or you hope we’ll see.? Is just evolving rate design to make all aspects of this more practical and more palatable?

Richard:                            22:45                   Yeah I think like a lot of things, it just the regulation to some extent sort of trails behind the innovators and, and the trends in the market that, you know, more market team sense tends to respond quicker than the policy and the regulatory environment does. And I know there’s, there’s a lot of conversation, at least here and I know elsewhere as well, at least in the northeast and the region about storage, as we the sort of overarching overriding goals that most of the northeastern states have, is some large percentage of the electric grid being renewable going forward. And so how do we get there and meet those goals? And I think that there need to be some signals to the market that support those sort of higher level policies. And a lot of that is, is going to be through rates and providing incentives to, to just, I mean, the reason that we have so much solar in certain states and not others is because of a net metering and feed in tariff incentives. And you know, so there’s policy and there’s dollars that went along with that policy to drive those market decisions that that market then responds to those situations that are put into place. But on the storage, I think it’s the same case, if we were able to value the time of day in the, in the rate design, you and you, and you had to you know, you were basically incentivized for not using electricity during peak times. There, there would be some, some more incentives for putting storage in place or for the market to come forward with storage solutions that would be cheaper potentially, Or you have incentives to, to store and use your own onsite electricity rather than relying on, on more expensive, dirtier electricity at peak times from the grid. Yeah.

Robb:                                25:14                   And I know some different utilities from different regulators are playing with things like that. You’re probably more familiar with them than I am, but there’s definitely a move in that direction in A lot of places.

Richard:                            25:30                   Yeah. There definitely is. California has been thinking about this for a while. They’re pretty aggressive in all of this. And they now have this time differentiated rate where at least every hour of the day, if not every 15 minutes of the day is valued differently. And, and so that, that gets pretty complicated. But as we get more sophisticated with, with controls and, and, and having algorithms that drive decisions, if they’re price signals that are built into rates that encourage people to use or not use electricity at different times of day, that that can get translated into real dollars. And it encourages people to make decisions that hopefully align with what the policies are in moving us towards renewables. So that any more than what we had at wanted to, you know, want it to focus on in terms of buildings and heat pumps. But really it’s all connected and it’s really interesting to see this push and pull between individual choices at the consumer level, with this technology that now works in our climates and it’s this cheap cheaper PV opportunities. And how that impacts our public policy and our rate making and our grid infrastructure. It’s all in flux and changing rapidly.

Robb:                                27:15                   And it always will be. So aside from storage, are there other kinds of technologies you’re hoping for, you’re wishing for you see in the near future?

Richard:                            27:33                   Well, you know, as we try to figure out where heat pumps fit into the building space as we’ve got these really lofty goals in our northeastern states around decarbonization and electrification and weaning us off of fossil fuels. I mean, there’s a tremendous amount of work to be done in the transportation sector, but we’re really focusing on the building sector here. We’ve got a lot of buildings in the northeast that burned fuels, fuel oil, propane. And if we can displace that with heat pumps there’ll be some significant savings there too. But we have yet to really figure out how to best integrate the heat pumps and the existing heating plants that are in our buildings, furnaces and boilers. And there’s some mixed messaging going out there about just run these things down to certain temperatures, you know, run the heat pump down to 25 degrees, then turn on your heating system, or just running during the shoulder seasons and run your traditional heating system the rest of the time. And then others saying, no, just set them and forget them, but set your thermostat a little lower and the central existing heating system will kick in to sort of fill in the gaps when the, when the heat pumps aren’t able to meet the load of the building. But we have yet to see sort of smart integrated controls that, that provide good economic outcomes for the, for the consumer. You know, at any given day it might be above 25 degrees, then below 25 degrees, are we expecting people to sort of turn their systems on and off? I don’t think so. And one size does not fit all, depending on whether you’re buying propane at 3 or 4 dollars a gallon. I saw more than $4 a gallon for small deliveries the other day, I was just outraged. So anyhow, with expensive propane and oil and relative to the electric rates, who’s sort of optimizing and at the same time we’ve got differing efficiencies, different COPs of the heat pumps based on the outdoor air temperature. So it’s going to cost more per btu delivered at colder temperatures from a heat pump than it is at warmer temperatures. How does that cost per delivered Btu compare to cost per delivered Btu from your furnace or boiler? We can’t expect consumers to make those choices. We need to figure out controls that optimize which systems to run and maybe prioritize the electric over the delivered fuels if there’s some sort of some sort of factor or value for carbon impact that somebody wants to layer in as well too. But we need to have better, smarter controls that will help optimize the performance of our systems, especially as we have multiple heating and potentially cooling systems in our buildings. And so I think that’s another area of opportunity that we really haven’t figured out yet.

Robb:                                31:29                   And maintain comfort I would add.

Richard:                            31:31                   And maintain comfort, you know, and that’s the bottom line. That’s one of the bottom lines to consumers, comfort and cost. So how do we deliver that in a way that’s simple and make sense and maybe it responds in real time to the cost of the fuels and the outdoor temperature, the efficiency of the system and signals. Anyway, there’s a lot of work to be done.

Robb:                                32:00                   So where can people find out more about you and some of these programs? We can link on our on our show notes page. Your website is?

Richard:                            32:11                   energyfuturesgroup.com. It’s a mouthful, but somebody already had efg.com.

Robb:                                32:16                   All right. And you mentioned the video showing some of the zero energy now?

Richard:                            32:35                   Yeah, our website does have some links to some of our projects. All of our projects on there. And there’s a page on the building. You can actually see our consumption in real time. Our engaged monitor feeds the data up to the web. And so there’s a link there. You can see how poorly it performs on a day like today where the snow is covering our solar panels, yet our heat pumps are on. But then in the summertime how much electricity kilowatt hours we’re banking waiting for the winter as we have no loads and lots of sun. Anyhow. energyfuturesgroup.com.

Robb:                                33:23                   Excellent. I will provide links to all that. Well this is a lot, Richard. There’s lots going on, but thank you very much for, for joining us.

Richard:                            33:31                   Good. Well, I appreciate the conversation. We’ve all got a lot of work to do and I think we still have a lot to learn.

Speaker 5:                        33:43                   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 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.

Tim McDonald

Tim McDonald is the President and CEO of Onion Flats LLC. Tim is a licensed architect in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In 1997, with his brother Patrick, he co-founded Onion Flats LLC; a Philadelphia based real estate development/design/build firm. Tim has been an adjunct Professor of Architecture at Philadelphia University, Temple University, University of Calgary, and University of Pennsylvania. His service and experience extend into his community by holding current positions in the Northern Liberties Neighbors Association Zoning Committee, the Philadelphia Sustainability Advisory Board, as well as a previous position on the Old City Civic Association Board of Directors. Tim is also Founder/President of FAARM, a non-profit organization dedicated solely to the exhibition of art and architecture in Philadelphia. Tim is a Certified LEED Accredited Professional and Passive House Certified Consultant and Tradesman.

Did you know that in the U.S., 48% of energy consumption and 45% of greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to buildings (EIA 2012)? As designers, developers, and maintenance professionals who work with buildings, we have a responsibility to reverse these negative effects to preserve our resources and protect the health of future generations. So, where do we begin?

To kick-off season 2 of the Buildings and Beyond podcast, we are joined by Tim McDonald, President and Co-Founder of Philadelphia-based development firm, Onion Flats. As an architect and developer, Tim has made it his mission to ensure that each new project is one step closer to net-positive performance. By incorporating new strategies in design and construction, Tim explains the top three things developers, designers, and builders should think about when creating quality, efficient, and affordable housing.

More on Tim and Onion Flats:

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 Robb Aldrich.

Kelly: (00:19)
And I’m Kelly Westby.

Kelly: (00:24)
We are so excited to bring you season two of Buildings and Beyond. To start out this season, I will be speaking with Timothy McDonald. In 1997 Tim and his brother founded Onion Flats, a Philadelphia based real estate design, development, and build firm. Tim and Onion Flats have been on a bit of a sustainability journey over the past two decades and his experience is invaluable to anyone who considers themselves in the design, construction or sustainability industries. Tim takes a design thinking approach to development. Each new project is building on the lessons learned from the previous project and taking us a step or two closer to net positive impact. I started out by asking Tim what he thinks are the top three things developers, designers and builders should think about when trying to design quality, efficient, affordable housing. Tim does an excellent job of describing his perspective, so let’s just dive right in.

Tim: (01:25)
Well, I guess the first one is related to who we are as a company. And I think that’s pretty important, because we’re a vertically integrated company. We’re developers, architects and builders, which means ultimately that we control the process from beginning to end. And I think that that’s how quality really happens. I think that being a vertically integrated company allows us to build more cost effectively because there just aren’t as many layers that need liability to slow us down or to cost us more money. And I think we’re more agile and nimble as a company. If we run into problems, we turn them into opportunitiesrather than change orders, which costs more money, we actually make a problem costs less money. So I think that that’s the first thing. The first thing is that to be a vertically integrated company is just really helpful in doing any kind of architecture. I think the second one is that you really just have to be committed to a particular definition of what sustainability is. You just have to want it and you have to be committed to it. And for us over the past 10 years, sustainability is no longer a kind of generalized sense. It’s really focused primarily on climate change, because it is the existential threat that we all face. And it is the focus of all of our work. And because of that, we’ve been looking for the right tool to allow us to design and build buildings that are cost effective, that don’t contribute carbon to the environment. And for us, that’s passive house. So to me it’s about, when you find the right tool, you work with that, which doesn’t mean that our sense of sustainability doesn’t also include issues around water and transportation and indoor air quality and so forth. But, I would say if you want to know what we are about, that is the focus, until we’re gone that’s the focus of our work. And I guess the third one might be that we just really believe that there are two ways to get the word out about the significance of this issue of climate change and how buildings contribute to it. And that is either: you demonstrate it through your own work and then you go share that as much as you possibly can, or you legislate it. You get it changed, you get building codes changed. You work with affordable housing agencies, which is this initiative that we started about four or five years ago, to get not so much legislation, but the way that affordable housing gets funded, we worked really hard on that. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are two parts of what we do. One is that we’re advocates of this kind of work and we go around the country to try and talk about it as much as possible, and then we demonstrate it with our own work.

Kelly: (05:06)
Right. And thanks by the way for sharing this to all of our listeners. Advocating and getting the word out that way. So how did you come to the passive house standards specifically? Were there other standards that you looked at or tried and what were your thoughts around that?

Tim: (05:26)
So the first project where we took on any notion of sustainability was in 2001 or 2 I believe. And we weren’t really educated in sustainability as a kind of guiding practice. And then we built this project called Rag Flats, which, you know, for us, sustainability was doing our first PV system. It was about collecting rainwater. It was about a kind of urban planning approach to a community, which talked about social sustainability. After that we discovered LEED. And in about 2004, we built the first LEED gold project in the city. After that we built the first LEED platinum projects some of the first in the country. And I think that was really important for us because what we loved at the time about LEED was the structure of accountability, and it allowed us to address the multifaceted dimensions of sustainability that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to holistically put together on your own. So it made us better architects. It made us better builders and made us more aware of what was important. And then we began to realize after we did that for a while, that pretty much all of what LEED was about was just naturally built into our work. So we would never not buy a dual flush toilet again, you know, you’d never not use sealants or paints that had VOCs in them because they were readily available. So there wasn’t a lot of work that we discovered except around the area of energy. And this is when we came to discover passive house about 10 years ago. It was also the time when we started to become more aware of climate change and architecture’s contribution to that. So, it’s really been an organic process of learning about sustainability and what’s important and passive house is just the, I mean, we’re at a crisis and so, you know, I’m much more interested in radically reducing energy consumption. I will always also try to manage storm water, but if I’m not required and there’s a line, and I have to choose where my money goes, it’s always gonna go towards energy conservation because of the impacts on the environment.

Kelly: (08:41)
Right. And that kind of circles back to, I think it was your second point about having a focus that this is what you’re going after. So anytime you have to weigh those two options, you know where you’re going. That’s great. And I know you talk a lot or at least I’ve given some presentations about the cost of building these really efficient buildings and maybe it doesn’t have to be more expensive to build a more efficient building. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that?

Tim: (09:12)
Yeah, I mean, the way I like to put it is, forget about passive house for a second. If you went out and just got bids on a code built multifamily building, you’d have a wide range of prices, right? So it’s very difficult to say it doesn’t cost more, or it does cost more. What I like to say is that it can cost more and it doesn’t have to cost more. And the first way to make sure that you hone in and control the costs of a project, have to do with how you’re structured as a company. And if it’s built in a ‘buildings are designed and built in this classic design bid build’ approach, I think it’s extremely problematic, because all that ends up happening is you design a project, you put it out to bid, it comes back too expensive.

Tim: (10:20)
And they do this wonderful thing called value engineering, which essentially strips everything out of the project. We work exactly the opposite. We have the builder (us) in the room the exact day before any drawings are done. We set goals for what we’re trying to achieve. We develop strategies for mechanical systems before drawings are done before we even start drawings. So it’s all about building the strategies around construction, around insulation, around air ceiling, around larger issues of design, like urban issues, issues about community, establishing them first, having all the players, engineers, architects, subcontractorsGC not so much the bank, but the owner, in the room at the same time. And then going from there, because I can’t tell you how many times we’ve worked in the other structure with your kind of the typical arrangement where you’ve got an owner that hires the architect, the architect designs the building, then gives the building to the engineer, then the engineer designs mechanical system that is not integrated with the architecture. And then there’s redoing of that. And then there are contractors that haven’t done that kind of work. So when it gets to the bidding process, their numbers are jacked up because it’s because it’s a new process. And so when we say it doesn’t have to cost more money, the main way we achieve that is by having an integrated team.

Kelly: (12:09)
Great. And it’s interesting you’re talking about that. I think the industry talks about an integrated process a lot, but we don’t necessarily get there. LEED requires an integrated process meeting, and so we have the meeting, and thats it. So that’s interesting that youre so fully integrated across the three entities there, that you can really be doing this on a continuous basis. It’s not an integrated design meeting, It’s really an integrated design process.

Tim: (12:44)
Absolutely. And again, this issue of value engineering is a perfect example of the failure of the design bid build process. Because we have a similar thing that happens as we’re going through the process all the way through the construction process, but I really mean it when I say we hit those roadblocks and we’re able to step back and come up with an alternative solution that is very often, if not always less expensive, that we couldn’t have foreseen in the process. Now, that doesn’t happen when somebody has got a contract to do the mechanical system and they say, well, you know, this was missing in the drawings, so it’s just gonna cost more to do what you’re doing because I have to re tool. And that just doesn’t happen with us.

Kelly: (13:36)
Right. And what we see a lot with my role in building commissioning is that there’ll be sort of side deals between the mechanical contractor and the GC or between the mechanical contractor and the owner, that the owner doesn’t even really fully understand what’s missing through this value engineering, all they see is that dollar figure. So you really have a better understanding of all of the different systems so you can make an educated decision when someone comes to you with that.

Tim: (14:06)
And I’m sure you’ve experienced the more insidious structures, where maybe the GC isn’t all that interested ultimately in the kind of energy efficiency that you are. And so he or she is doing everything they can to kind of undermine whether the project goes in that direction or not, sometimes very subtle ways and sometimes really obvious ways to the point where the owner gets scared and says, and the GC says, you know what, I’m much more used to working with these mechanical systems, I’ve got a real problem with this new system that these people are talking about, scares the owner, and then all of a sudden the team starts to fragment. So that’s why it’s not just got to be an integrated team, but everybody’s got to be committed to the same goal.

Kelly: (14:59)
Right. That’s a really interesting point. And I think something that I didn’t understand when I first started in the industry, how even when we say, oh, the GC and the owner, maybe they’re the same team, sometimes you really have them operating as two separate entities within the company. And definitely within different companies you might have. So how do we orient everybody towards the same goal? So how do you do that with subcontractors and other vendors and things like that? How do you really kind of show them your vision and orient them towards your same goal?

Tim: (15:31)
In some ways you have to choose. So for instance, it’s not that hard when it comes to drywall. Right? I don’t need to tell my drywall guy the vision for the project. In other ways, it’s really just about really good project management. So for instance, when you hire an insulation contractor and you say it’s a blown cellulose, right? Dense Pack cellulose or even mineral roll in the walls, there are ways to put insulation in that don’t take any more time or any more money. And then there are ways to put it in where there are gaps. And so it’s all about having the right people watching the project very careful and just keeping people honest and doing the work that they’re supposed to do. I’ve found that the more you don’t talk, and this is going to sound very strange, but the more you don’t talk about how unique this building is, the better. The more cost effective your construction budgets are gonna be, and the better work you get. And I know that sounds strange, but if I were to tell my framer that this is a passive house project and it’s one of the most energy efficient buildings in the world and it’s extremely unique, all of a sudden that subcontractor starts getting scared and maybe he doesn’t understand what is going into it. Maybe he’s missed something in the drawing, so all of a sudden he puts a little extra in his budget. So I try to, this is gonna sound weird too, but I try not to sit down and in those meetings try to describe how unique this is. I just sit down and I say, okay, this is our air barrier and this is how we handle the air barrier. Every time you puncture this air barrier, this is what you do. Got It? Yes. Okay. Move on. Just really straightforward stuff. It’s just here’s the process of putting this building together, here are the joints that need to be dealt with, here are the things that really matter when it comes to the energy efficiency of the building, and here are the things that dont. The kitchen and floor finishing people anf the tile people, they don’t have to be a part of the vision. You really have to identify the critical subs that need to know and only on a need to know basis do they need to know.

Kelly: (18:17)
Right, right. That’s really interesting and actually it brings up an interesting question in my mind of performance based SPEC versus prescriptive SPEC. You kind of talked a little bit about that. Do you have some thoughts? It looks like you maybe do.

Tim: (18:33)
Well I just think it’s silly that it’s not performance based. I mean, why the hell can’t we just give a miles per gallon approach to a building in the same way that we do to cars and forget about energy codes? Just say this is how much energy your building needs to consume, it can’t consume any more. What are you going to do? You can do anything you want to make this happen. I don’t need to tell you what your r-values are for your walls, you’re gonna figure that out. I don’t need to tell you what your minimum this or minimum that is. You’re going to figure it out very quickly because you’re going to have to do an energy model and you’re going to have to make these numbers work. So I believe in design performance based rather than prescriptive. And then, the other performance side of things is how it actually happens. Like what actually happens? What happens when people move in? I like to say that your job is only half done when you build the building. The other half is about educating the tenants or the owners of your buildings, following up with them, understanding how their behavior has changed or not changed and how that’s affecting the performance of their building.So I mean, those are my thoughts.

Kelly: (19:53)
Yeah. Great. And it’s interesting in contrast a little bit to how you were talking about how you’re presenting things to your subcontractors. You’re not necessarily saying to them, this is the performance Spec for your whole building air barrier, you’re giving them sort of a prescriptive approach. But from the design side, you’re taking more of a.. Is that accurate?

Tim: (20:14)
Yeah I mean I’m making a couple of assumptions. So when it comes to critical subs, the framers are a critical sub, but I’ve already taken a lot of the questions out of the equation for the sub because I will never not work with a prefabricated wall system anymore. So I work with a panelized system that has the air barrier built in, that has the exterior insulation already on, that has the WRB already on and that has the windows and doors already installed.

Kelly: (21:08)
So all they need is to see all those pieces together?

Tim: (21:12)
Yes. So, I think that that the kind of broader context of that is about understanding how we need to change the way we build buildings in general because we’re still building buildings one stick at a time, the way we’ve been doing for a hundred years and we need to find ways to become more industrialized around how we do it. So I’m a fan of the idea of modular building, the idea of panelization, the idea of eliminating all of these typical areas where we’re failures can occur and they shouldn’t have to. So that’s the other part of this is, is that you have to rethink how you build, if you’re going to do it cost effective. That also relates to being cost effective, right? Because not only do I not want to trust guys to install windows on my site and have them airtight, I don’t want them to take the time to do that. So it takes less time to build these buildings if you think through these processes in a more effective way and it costs less money.

Kelly: (22:22)
Right. So it’s actually interesting how you brought that up, because I think you’re almost saying, well if you were to build a passive house by just doing exactly what you’ve been doing and adding a couple inches of installation, that’s going to cost more. And it’s going to be more difficult. Maybe you take up more floor space, but if you take a step back and re-imagine the whole thing, now we can get to a better place.

Tim: (22:45)
Yup. Mechanical systems are another perfect example.

Kelly: (22:48)
Yeah, let’s get into that.

Tim: (22:49)
So I can’t tell you how many engineers that I’ve worked with where they run their duct works in a passive house building. They run their ducts all the way to the exterior wall. Their heating and cooling or ventilation ducks. And I say, you don’t have to do that. You just pop it into the building, pop it into the room. You can save 12 or 15 feet of ductwork. They say they cant do that. Well, why can’t they do that? Because they’re used to having cold walls. And so they’ve got a wash those cold walls with heat and in the winter time. And so there’s this thinking that you have to break through when it comes to mechanical systems, engineers would say, oh my God, this is going to cost so much more money because I’ve got to have this dedicated air system. There’s an ERV/HRV that’s separate from the heating cooling? My God. And there are ways to design it that are cost effective and ways to design it where it’s twice as much. And so I spend a lot of time and I do a lot of research on how I can cost effectively do three things, heating and cooling, ventilation, and hot water, because those can be twice as much if you do them in the wrong way, right? So there are systems now, that are just becoming available where you’ve got, especially for apartments, small apartments where you’ve got heating, cooling and ventilation all built into one unit with no condenser to the roof, the condensers built into the unit, just imagine all those copper line sets that you would run for a mini split to an apartment, which everybody thinks is the cheapest way to go, isn’t anymore.

Kelly: (24:43)
Great. And you have worked with these packaged unit?

Tim: (24:47)
Right now I’m working with them. I’m installing 28 of them.

Kelly: (24:51)
Great. And how did you get to that? Did you ever think about using central systems and did you try that and have some tiers?

Tim: (25:04)
Yup, exactly. We just built and it’s literally about 200 feet away from where we’re sitting. A centralized Geo therman heating, cooling and hot water system for a 25 unit apartment building. And it’s great in theory, but ultimately what’s pushed me away from that is the complexity of it all. Without going into detail about it, the idea of having one unit in an apartment that does all things, if it breaks down, just go and fix it. If my geothermal pump stops, 25 apartments go down. If my VRF system loses pressure in the line sets in th refrigerant lines, the whole thing goes down. So it was a great experiment. And every single project we’ve ever done for the past 22 years has been an experiment. And I hope we keep making mistakes but they keep getting smaller. And so it’s ironic that I thought three years ago that this centralized approach to multifamily housing, especially when you’re building passive houses, including the electric, why have individual meters when you’ve got utility bills that are like 20 bucks a month? Like what? And if you’ve got PV to cover that, why would you have a separate room for just the individual meters? So centralize electrical meters, centralized systems. I thought this was the bee’s knees. This is what I’d be repeating for the next 20 years. Well, I’m not, now I’m going decentralized and probably in a couple more years I’ll have more evidence about the value of one versus another and they’ll all continue to work. But that’s what keeps me excited.

Kelly: (27:14)
Yeah. There’s always something new to learn. Yeah, that’s actually really interesting because we’ve also been looking real data basically. I think in the existing building world, people have gotten on board with, okay, how’s this building performing after we make an upgrade? But in the new construction world, we’re really not holding our GCS, owners, and development teams accountable for the actual performance of the building. Kind of like what you said, your job really isn’t done. And that’s music to my ears as a commissioning person because turnover is sort of our big timeframe, right? So if we look at actual performance, how are these buildings that are so efficient, really working in the real world? And one thing that we found that I think is so interesting and just want to put out there to the industry, is that we’ve been seeing in New York City, we love Ptac. For some reason architects hate them, a lot of developers love them. And we’ve been saying these are giant holes in the walls. How are we going to account for that? Are these really performing well? Rated efficiencies are pretty low. But based on some buildings that we’ve started to look at data for, comparing the gas p tax, so it said 80% efficient gas furnace, clients are anecdotally telling us and we’re looking at some data now that indicates that actually maybe they’re performing better than your giant central VRF system in some cases. And so this sort of decentralized, you turn it on only when you need it, you pay for it kind of system,that doesn’t have distribution losses, and doesn’t have the opportunity to leak- by the way refrigerants are a greenhouse gas in and of themselves. Then, you know, actually maybe that’s the way.

Tim: (29:14)
Well I’m putting this out there. It’s an idea and my dad used to say ideas are like noses. Everybody’s got one. It’s all about what you do with it. But my next kind of project that I’m going to take on, is I’m going to create the next level- we don’t even have a magic box yet in the US, and a magic for those of you who don’t know is a, it’s about the size of a refrigerator, it’s in some countries in Europe, but it’s for small houses and apartments, but it’s about the size of a refrigerator, it’s got a heat pump in it. It does heating, it does cooling, it does ventilation, and it does hot water. Now what that tells me is why wouldn’t we have a system that eliminates all the heat pumps in our apartments? Because there are more. I’ve got a refrigerator that has a heat pump, I’ve got a dryer that has a heat pump. I’ve got potentially a stove, not so much a stove that’s a heat pump, but there are at least two more heat pumps in an apartment. So I have this idea for an invention that essentially takes a magic box and then sends refrigerant to another box, which is called a refrigerator, sends a refrigerant to another box, which is called a dryer. So we’ve got to start thinking much more integrally and in a small way about the spaces that we live in and about the amount of mechanical equipment that we have. And I don’t think passive house is there yet because they’re still dealing with separate ventilation systems from heating and cooling systems, separate, separate heat pumps all over the place. So I think there’s a lot of room for invention when it comes to the mechanical systems. But I’m not surprised that a ptac works. Do you know that our first passive house project, we took a ptac because we couldn’t find anything cost effective to work with in an affordable housing three town homes. We took a ptac and instead of putting it through the wall, we put it on the third floor and we insulate, we ducted the supply to the building and ducted the supply from the outside, ducted and super insulated the ducts. And then we tied that into an erv. So we made this kind of Frankenstein mechanical system out of a ptac and it’s been working beautifully.

Kelly: (32:01)
Oh, that’s really interesting. When you get creative, what you can do.

Tim: (32:05)
Yeah. No, I wouldn’t do that again.

Kelly: (32:07)
Yeah. We have some other solutions now. That’s great. And so we kind of got to this point, but when we have you back on the podcast in five years what are we going to be talking about then?

Tim: (32:24)
Well that’s a good question. My kids going to college.

Kelly: (32:33)
They’ll invent the magic box.

Tim: (32:35)
So our company is in a real push over the next five years to develop property that we’ve owned for awhile and we’ve got plans on all of them and there’s, at the moment, about another 200 units that we’re going to be developing over the next three years actually. And so in five years, not only will they be built, but we’ll be able to really talk about performance and where we got things right, where we got things wrong. We’ve also just broken into the kind of client realm that is interested in this stuff at a very large scale, which I can’t really talk about, but within five years, this very large scale building in Philadelphia, I hope is going to be here, and I hope it’s going to be a passive house and I hope it’s going to be a net zero energy building. And I hope it’s then when the industry itself is going to say, hey, this isn’t an option anymore, and we’ve demonstrated there been plenty of people demonstrating that this is not only possible, but it’s intelligent and so it won’t be a crisis. You know,.

New Speaker: (34:02)
I’m hoping that what we’re talking about here is standard practice. That’s what I hope.

Kelly: (34:09)
That’s awesome and a really good and hopeful note to end on. Thank you so much for coming in and being part of the podcast.

Speaker 4: (34:21)
Thank you for listening to buildings and beyond. For more information about the topics discussed today, visit www.swinter.com/Podcast and check out the episode show notes. Buildings and beyond is brought to you by Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. Our professionals have led the way since 1972 in the development of best practices to achieve high performance buildings. Our production team for today’s episode includes Dylan Martello, Alex Mirabile, and myself. Heather Breslin, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.

David Unger

David Unger is the founding CEO of Sentient Buildings LLC, a New York clean-tech startup that enables property owners and managers to conserve energy and reduce operating costs for multi-family, commercial and institutional buildings through a comprehensive Building Management System (BMS), while Maximizing the Value of Comfort™. With more than 20 years of experience growing technology-focused companies, David has been a pioneer in the use of internet and web-based technologies.

The buildings where we live, work, and play are getting smarter. Even our refrigerators can tell us if we need to buy more cheese while we are at the grocery store. But that’s not what this episode is about. Mostly not.

Today we are talking to David Unger, Founder of Sentient Buildings and an expert in the strategic implementation of IoT technologies that help to create smarter buildings. In an era of data overload, David discusses how his work aims to consolidate and simplify access to information that can improve the efficiency, comfort, and operations of buildings. He also explains why leveraging open communication protocols is the most critical piece to future-proofing your smart building. 

Case Studies

This episode marks the end of our first season of the Buildings and Beyond podcast. We are already gearing up for season 2, so send us your feedback, questions, and ideas for future episodes to [email protected]! We plan to compile your questions and present them on a Q&A episode in between seasons. So stay tuned!

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

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

Hosts: Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby

Production Team: Heather Breslin | Alex Mirabile | Dylan Martello

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

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

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

Robb: (00:18)
I’m Robb Aldrich

Kelly: (00:19)
and I’m Kelly Westby,

Robb: (00:21)
building owner or manager in New York City? Smart buildings NYC is your Go-to guide to learn how to comply with the new codes mandated on all large buildings in New York City. Find out how the technology discussed on this episode can help your building get ranked higher by visiting www.smartbuildings.NYC.

Kelly: (00:40)
Well, it is bittersweet to be introducing the final episode of this first season of buildings and beyond. I want to thank you all for going on this journey of podcast development with us, or if this is your first episode, definitely go back and listen to all of the others, because we really had some great conversations this season. Today we are venturing a little into the beyond by having a guest outside of the immediate SWA team. David Unger is the founding CEO of Sentient Buildings, SWA and Sentient have a strategic partnership that I think speaks to the way that we see the term smart buildings and what it really means to us. We don’t think that adding more and more sensors to generate more and more data points in buildings is smart. Smart buildings live at the intersection of behavioral science, building science, and computer science. To put it a little more simply, smart buildings bring together building systems, technology and people, and what better person to bring the technology piece to SWA and to those listening to buildings and beyond other than David Unger.

Kelly: (01:42)
Dave founded an innovative web services company in the 90s and eventually moved to become chief technology officer of US energy group. This transfer focused his technology expertise on improving the built environment, which he has fully solidified at Sentient buildings. I’ll let Dave introduce you to who’s Sentient is and what they do. So let’s just dive right into the episode. So welcome Dave to the podcast. How’s it going?

Dave: (02:08)
Good!

Kelly: (02:09)
good. Thanks for coming out to our Norwalk office. So I sort of introduced the topic a little bit in the intro, but I wanted to get started with your take on what the term smart buildings means to you.

Dave: (02:26)
So smart building to me means a building that has a sense of awareness of its environment. a building that not only can sense what’s going on but can actually react to the environment in specific ways, whether that’s human controlled, or that’s fully automated at some level. But a smart building is a building that can actually react to its environment and control things and monitor and manage things in a way that aids in energy efficiency, aids in comfort and also monitors and protects against major issues that could cause problems in a building. So, a smart building is really a sense of awareness that the building has of itself It’s not an alive building in a lot of ways, but it’s, it’s, it’s a building that can react to its environment intelligently and do something

Kelly: (03:24)
great. I mean, we all are loving the plant walls that are cleaning our air. So the idea of a fully live building that’s aware of itself sounds pretty good. SWAs position, I would say in the thought of what a smart building means is that it’s tying together the technology aspect that I think you talked about just now. And then also with the building systems and with the people and tying these three things together, how do you think that technology relates to building systems and people?

Dave: (04:02)
Yeah, well, I mean technology is really the glue that basically can take a system and integrate that system with a communication network. And then expose that network through some type of interface to a person. Right? So the three pieces of a system in a smart building include those three things. Really you need a system that you’re monitoring, controlling or doing something with that you can imbue at some level of intelligence. And then you have the technology which includes the network. So whether that’s a wireless communication network or wired network or some way of getting data from point a to point B. And then back again from point B to point A, the network itself then can collect that data and expose that data in real time or near real time to an end user who can do something about it or, you know, monitor the building or collect data on the building or analyze the data or do something to affect the performance and operations of the building either in real time or over time.

Kelly: (05:03)
Great. And then you talked a little bit in the beginning about smart buildings and comfort and energy. What else can we do kind of with this technology other than monitoring energy?

Dave: (05:18)
In the case of smart buildings, it goes well beyond just monitoring the energy systems in a building. I mean, were talking about other systems, security systems, the elevators, the lighting, which does relate to energy, but there are many other systems that are in a building that are effectively smart and can be networked. And a real smart building brings all of these systems together into a single view, an integrated view of building operations. So you can see everything going on in the building, and the building can react. So for example, if you have a card key access system where you can tell who’s coming in and out of a building, then that affects your energy systems, right? Cause then you know, okay, I need to bring this building up to temperature because I have occupants, or my occupancy has gone down so I can reduce that. So there’s, there are a lot of things that you could do with a fully integrated system that includes much more than energy based systems. And that’s really what you have to drive when looking into this in a holistic way. Because the long-term view of this is, is all of the systems need to be integrated, not just the energy systems.

Kelly: (06:23)
Right. And that’s great. And I think the context now of ASHRAE 90.1 is requiring more monitoring and control of systems. And we also work with a lot of projects that do enterprise green communities and they require water monitoring. And so pulling all these things together in one unified space Sounds like really the best option.

Dave: (06:45)
Right? Yeah. So when people talk about energy, you usually think about just electricity or gas or even in New York City districts, steam. but in a lot of cases, you really need to look at water- in the usage of water. It’s a commodity. It’s a resource that we typically need to control and monitor and make sure we don’t use too much of. And it can cost just as much. Water sometimes can be just as big of an expense for building owner than the energy costs.

Kelly: (07:17)
So all of this sounds good. I’m on board. We’re going to have all of the buildings. You can outfit my home with all the smart sensors and it’ll control myself. and the refrigerator Will Walk to the store and buy my milk for me. That sounds great. Right. But I know we have probably some people that are not as on board as you and I. So Srikanth was on the podcast a few episodes ago and he mentioned, I don’t know that he said this word for word, but, that monitoring is okay, but control, he’s not so sure about. Audi came out with this commercial that was a little anti A.I., I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but we can link to it in the show notes. My mom refuses to drive her new Honda Crv because the lane assist is trying to tell her what to do. Right. So what, you know, you were talking a little bit less about smart homes and smart cars, but what are the top three concerns from building owners and how do you address them?

Dave: (08:17)
Well, I mean, the biggest concern from a building owner by implementing a smart building is how much is it going to cost me and is it going to, you know, deliver some type of R.O.I. at the end of the day or either it’s going to deliver more income by allowing them to increase rent or decreasing energy costs. But, you know, the biggest concern after that is, I want to make sure this is actually used, right? A concern of people that get involved in smart buildings, is I don’t want to be overloaded by information. Because the tendency with a lot of the building management systems over the years has been to fire out hundreds and thousands upon thousands of alarms. As you identify problems with the building. Well, you know, one person can only handle so much. And so you want to make sure that you’re tailoring and designing your smarter system to help people and augment people’s lives in a way that’s helpful, not that creates more work for them. So that is a real goal in designing smart buildings in a way that reduces people’s workloads. Cause that’s what that should be for. So that’s a typical concern? I haven’t really gotten the concern that I’m losing control, although, you know, from an operator standpoint, you know, they know their buildings better than anyone. So if you come in with a smart technology and say, Hey, this is going to solve all your problems, it’s going to be like a magic wand and the computer’s going to do everything and you just have to sit behind your desk and you know, throw your legs up and, you know, play solitaire- that’s not really, you know, what it’s designed for. I mean, you know, the real way to implement a smart building is to work with the operators, to work with owners and to figure out what’s that proper balance of, you know, too much information versus the right information. And then also working with the operators who know their buildings, they know their buildings well, to let them know it even better so if they could get insight that they never had before, that they really feel they need, that’s what you have to address in smart buildings.

Kelly: (10:33)
That’s great. And I love that you pulled the people piece there and I also loved one thing you said- smarter buildings. I think we’re always talking about smart buildings as almost a destination, but think about smarter buildings as always trying to be better. If you set up the framework, then you can then start to optimize one system at a time and you don’t need to be overwhelmed with all the data and the sensors. You can start and focus on one thing and then add in others as you have one system under control in your building.

Dave: (11:01)
Yeah, that’s, that’s true. I mean the point of going from smart to smarter is like the effect of learning. So if a building could actually learn it because it becomes smarter. So in thinking about these things, once you have a fully integrated system, right, where you could holistically integrate the security system like I mentioned before with the energy management systems and look at these things from those points of view, then you could start learning about the behavior and patterns that happen in a building. Like when do tenants typically change the temperature in a space? How many people are typically in a room before they start getting uncomfortable? You know, things like that. You start learning the behavior, and the building starts to, and the building could adjust and learn from those behaviors in a way that’s not intrusive. But you know, really understand, you know, gets an understanding if you will, of what’s going on. That’s goal is- is how do you get there. And you know, it’s going to be a constant over the next, you know, I would even say 20 years to get to a place that where you have a fully reactive building that can react to its environment.

Kelly: (12:06)
Right. And I want to dive in a little deeper to one of the things that you brought up, which is security. So connecting with the security system, I know that I’ve heard a lot of concern from clients about separating out the BMS- should not touch the elevators, should not touch other things. They’re worried about security concerns. I know there has been some situations in which BMS- building management systems- have been hacked, and elevators were controlled. How do you speak to that, maybe specifically for your service, but general as an industry?

Dave: (12:45)
Yeah, I look, I mean, we’re living in a dangerous world right now, right. Cyber security has become a major, major problem in this day and age where, you know, our infrastructure’s exposed right now in ways that are scary. Right? And so how do you protect against that? And you know, unfortunately the building management systems industry is notoriously been bad at protecting security. There’s been stories, going back, you know, now four or five years, you know, the target breach was because of the building management system that was unprotected. So there are issues where the building owners and operators don’t want their building taken over by hackers and their elevators like all brought up to the top floor and a fire lit in the bottom floor where, you know, suddenly their buildings completely exposed and it’s very dangerous situation.

Dave: (13:43)
So you have to really, as a smart building vendor in this day and age really think very carefully about how do you protect the building security as if it were a bank, right? Cause if you think about it, bank securities very strong too. Today, you don’t hear, you know, although it’s been done, but you know, you have to really protect the, the, the security systems those ways and that’s protecting the network, protecting the devices, making sure that your integration to different systems has some protection on it so that you can’t overstep your boundaries. And how do you create a system like that? You have to really think about it and build those security protocols into your network. Kind of think about it from the very beginning.

Dave: (14:33)
Every single communication point has to have some layer of protection or a deep layer protection on it so it’s not open to the outside world. You don’t have any security holes in the system. How do you connect your system to the outside world, to the cloud or to other mobile devices? What are you exposing? How do you audit that? You know, most importantly is like, if somebody does breach your system, how do you know what happened? So you need all of these protections in place to ensure real security and buildings. And then, you know, I think what should emerge over time are some real industry standards around this, just like it’s happening in the health insurance industry with Hipaa. There have been other, you know, security initiatives on the banking side, so building automation systems really need to embrace the security standards and implement them system wide. And then also they need to, you know, work with companies that are experts in breaching those systems so that you know where your holes are, because you don’t know what you don’t know unless you really do some thorough penetration testing is what it’s called, to know that you can’t break into the building and do some damage.

Kelly: (15:42)
Great. And so on your platform, are you running these tests regularly or how does that roll out?

Dave: (15:49)
you know, it comes down to cost, , and I can’t say that we’re doing it every time because it really depends on how secure a building owner needs the network to be. And then also, you know, on a lot in lot of these cases- the security, if you can manually override a system or if you have manual capability on the ground, so if somebody does try to do some damage to the building, like shutdown the heating plant or do something like that, as long as you build some protection there, then you can cut this off from controlling being controlled remotely. You know, you build those protections which are probably the safest way to protect against real damage and problems that may occur from a hack

Kelly: (16:32)
Right. I love what you said there about, you know, if something happens, then we have this resolution because I think that’s the same way we think about building science in terms of creating the proper wall. We make sure if water gets in well, then how will it get out of the wall? I think we have that same kind of alignment there. Right? If something happens, then what, what can we do? Right? Yeah. That’s great. So let’s get a little more specific. Are there some case studies, some buildings that you’ve deployed some of your technology in and, you know, give us the overview of what your technology means, what the different aspects of it are, and then a couple of examples of projects that you’ve been involved with

Dave: (17:16)
Yeah. So, you know, our goal as Sentient Buildings is really to deploy a wireless network infrastructure that is designed for Internet of things or devices to communicate over. So our real objective is to deploy that infrastructure. How do you get a wireless network infrastructure into a building that will allow you to monitor and control points where ever you want to put them without having to worry about running additional infrastructure once the networks in. That’s really the goal of what we’re trying to accomplish at Sentient so that we build a standards compliant wireless device network that will allow building owners to expand and grow so that they can add control points. They can add monitoring points as needed, as their needs change, right? Because their needs are not always going to remain the same. Tenants change, you know, building ownership changes, equipment changes, things change, right?

Dave: (18:13)
So how do you design a building network that can adapt to that change. And that’s what we do. And that’s, that’s our philosophy as a company. We know that things are going to change. And not only that, if you’re not standards compliant, you never want to lock your customer into a situation where they’re locked into a single vendor. And a lot of building owners, you know, through some of the bigger vendors, that happened to them over the years. You know, I’m not going to name names, but you know, there are a lot of big gorillas out there that lock their customers into a proprietary, building management systems. So our philosophy is how do you get standards compliant, wireless capable devices in a building.

Kelly: (18:58)
And standards compliant, let’s, let’s dive in a little bit. What do you mean by that?

Dave: (19:03)
Well just like there’s WIFI, which is a standard in effect, right? Ethernet is a standard, you know, there are standard communication protocols so that, you know, anytime you buy a car, a network communication card in your computer, you plug in an ethernet cable in your online. Well we have the same, you know, concept with when it comes to devices and buildings- that if you buy a thermostat and you put it in your building and you have this, you know, you, it’s a wireless network in the building, you can install that thermostat wherever you want to put it and it will communicate with the building network.

Kelly: (19:37)
Got It. It’s not like, Oh, I have ABC company’s wireless thermostats, so I need ABC companies, other module to then go to ABC company’s cloud. Right?

Dave: (19:45)
Right. You can select from a multitude of vendors that all comply with the standard so that you can get 10 different or 15 different types of thermostats, 20 different types of sensors, you know, so you have variety and you could go to different manufacturers, you know, at any point, so you’re not really locked in. Now WIFI is a standard. I brought that up as a wireless standard. It’s not a very good one when you’re doing device level building networks where power is a major concern in a lot of cases where you know, how do you power the devices? and you know, you don’t want to run 24 volt cable or get a transformer for every single device you want to put in a building. You need flexibility. So you want low power wireless device based networks. That will give you a tremendous amount of flexibility to wherever you want to put your sensors in your devices.

Dave: (20:33)
And also you want to think about, well I don’t only want to get data from the device, I want to send data to the device. So you need networks that can do both, that can transmit and receive, and that way you have full control. You have full flexibility. So once that networks in you have a real building that can become smarter, right? We talked about how do you make the building smarter? Well you can make the building smarter through making the software smarter and building in artificial intelligence, but you also make the building smarter by having a lot of flexibility where you can put points. Cause you don’t know everything you want to measure when you start a project and you find that out over time. So you need that flexibility so that you can reduce your costs. So that, that’s our just like, you know, talking about our projects, that’s where we start, right?

Kelly: (21:20)
So we want this flexibility. You like to provide these flexible pieces. So say I accidentally bought with the wrong guys a couple of years ago. We installed all these sensors and they are telling me they can only communicate, you know, amongst themselves. And I have to continue going to back to this vendor. Does that mean if I want to go with you, I have to rip out everything that I’ve already got installed in my building or how does that work?

Dave: (21:48)
Yeah, well a lot of times it means you have to put it in other infrastructure. so, if you went with a vendor that was proprietary, and I’m not going to name names, but there are a lot of them out there, that are proprietary, and you put that in and you know, that’s great. You now have to, if your thermostat network is based on this proprietary system, you’re only buying thermostats from that company and that’s, that’s it. Unless you want to put in a new network. and if you put it in the new network, then you have two different networks you have to maintain because you have to maintain the old thermostats and the new thermostats and nobody wants to do that. So you want a network that you put in, It’s a wireless network that can support multiple different types of thermostats. So that one day you decide, you know what, I need some more features on my thermostat, I need to upgrade. This is compatible with this standard. We use a few standards. The notion is a standard that we embrace. there’s also zigbee. There’s low row, which is now becoming a big standard out in the market. so these are all different standards that as a building owner, when you’re evaluating technologies, you should be looking at what standards the devices that you’re interested in getting support. Right. so when, so then relating that back to case studies, cause you know, I want to talk about some of the work that we’ve done in the area. Primarily we work in multifamily residential. We also do a lot of work in commercial office buildings. And then we’ve started to get involved in hospitality and in hotels. So those are really our three major areas where we’re deploying our networks. Our networks can, you know, be anything from a very simple monitoring system. Where we’re monitoring points that are on a boiler plant or we’re monitoring meters so that we can pull an energy data to an advanced system that we’re controlling the central plant. We’re controlling all of the terminal units in a building, bring that in all into a central system and allowing owners and operators to control those systems remotely and from their mobile devices.

Kelly: (23:54)
Right. And I want to break it down a little bit cause I know that we’ve talked a lot before, but about how there’s kind of three components really. There’s sort of the device- the individual thermostats, temperature sensors, whatever it is, there’s the network, and then they’re sending it to the cloud. Am I right in how I’m breaking that down?

Dave: (24:14)
Yeah. I mean there’s you know, the end what we would call the edge, right? You have edge devices. And then you know, you’ve got this new term called edge analytics, which we can talk about but edge devices are at the edge of your network. They’re in the tenant’s space, they might be in an apartment, they might be in an office space, they might be on a piece of equipment somewhere in a boiler plant. But those are, those are your edge devices. And then you need a gateway of some kind to concentrate all that data. So you can do your data collection and you could implement local control, because you don’t want to control from the cloud. You know what if something happens with your Internet connection and you lose connectivity to your building, you want the control of that building to happen continuously without network connectivity. It’s something you really need to understand when you’re looking at smart building systems- that there’s nothing that is cloud based that would impact the control of your building. And then you have those cloud connected controls, I’ll call them where you have them connected to the cloud, but they operate independently of the cloud. And then those kept Cloud Connect controls can send data up to the cloud. Now the cloud is a place of infinite computing resource, right? It’s where, you know, you can do a lot of number crunching, you can have a data warehouse where you can warehouse and store all your data and then you could use that to make intelligent observations on the data and intelligence. And so those are three components of a smart building. So once you bring something to the cloud, now you could start integrating other datasets and evaluating what’s going on in the building to the weather and to other things that may be happening in the building- to an event calendar

Kelly: (26:11)
dive in a little bit more into optimization rather than just sort of alarm management.

Dave: (26:16)
Right? And that’s where you get into analytics and you get into this process of continuous commissioning. So that you have a way of analyzing the data for fault detection for other problems. And then you could gain insight into long-term performance issues with the building through your analytics and cloud-based systems. And then, you know, another advantage of the cloud is then you could start bringing in data from multiple sites and you could bring that into a central view and provide an executive level view to owners and other people who are involved in the building so that they can at a glance get real understanding of what’s going on with all their billing assets.

Kelly: (27:02)
That’s great. Okay. Now our audience is saying, you talked about case studies three times and you still are talking really general. So let’s get into one of those.

Dave: (27:12)
Yeah. Okay so we did a project in the Bronx. The building is owned by Hudson Valley Property Group. It’s Keith and Kelly. I think it’s Keith Plaza and Kelly Towers on southern boulevard in the Bronx. And they have electric baseboard heaters. They had 1500 electric baseboard heaters and they had no monitoring, no control, no capability to see exactly what was going on with the heaters over the heating season and electric heat as you know, as an engineer is very expensive. So electric resistance heat is very expensive and they wanted to gain some operational control over that. The new management came in and they’re like, you know, we don’t want, you know, the heaters running nonstop during the heating season. People opening their windows while all electric resistance heat is running, there’s no worse condition than as an owner driving by an electric heated building to see all your windows open. Right. During December. Right. So they’re paying for all the electricity. So we installed that every baseboard heater controller that was on a wireless Mesh network. So every device, every heater, communicated with the next heater to form a mesh network that all communicated to a central receiver. Each receiver can communicate to up to 500 devices. So we had to split, you know, we had to have two receivers in the building there, thousand in one building and 500 in another. So what we enabled the owner to now do, is they could see every heater in their building. They can see the thermostats, we gave the tenants thermostats, so that they could set their temperature, the owner could set the limit of those thermostats remotely so they can adjust the heat and say, you know, we’re only going to provide up to 74 degrees in all of our apartments so that they could limit overheating. But more importantly what we were able to do there is, we were able to identify problems like where tenants were, you know, plugging in auxiliary heaters or opening their windows or putting their thermostat in the freezer. Which is, which is an issue which could happen. And so we were able to analyze data and use data analytics to say, we know that the heat has not been running, it’s 30 degrees outside, so the temperature in your apartment should be dropping yet it’s going up. Well that means that some other heater’s plugged in somewhere. Another, you know, example of the analytics that we’re running there is the, you know, the window’s open. So the heat’s been running nonstop constantly for six hours and it hasn’t gone up a degree. Right. So, you know, you’re, in both cases you have a problem that you can identify remotely with the system.

Dave: (30:11)
And at the end of every day we produce a report or you could log on online and get the report and just say, okay, these five apartments have this problem, this, these five apartments, have that problem. And then as a management, you can decide how you want to address it.

Kelly: (30:25)
Great. So we’re going from 1500 units or 1500 heaters. I can’t remember what you said. 1500 heaters. To then down to the five heaters that are really causing problems.

Dave: (30:36)
And then you have a good measurement of your average building temperature. And so what we’re doing this year, is a private project we’re implementing on top of that system. By the way we saved year over year, 23%, over the fire years heating season.

Kelly: (30:51)
And what was building management doing with the reports that you are giving them? Did you get any feedback on that?

Dave: (30:55)
Yeah, we got feedback. I mean, it was a process. I mean, you know, we learned a lot in working with the owners. Like we learned not to give them too much data, like really pair it down and give them like what are the top five offenders? Don’t give them all 50 of them. So you learn, you learn through the process so that they can, you know, have a set of data that they can easily work with. Right. So that was a learning experience for us in the process and working with the owners. And the other thing we determined by putting this project in place was we determined that you can actually control your demand in the building during heating season so that you can limit your demand with some intelligence so that you can rotate heaters off that are closer to set point for short periods of time. And then so that way you can shed load by 20%, So that you can do peak load shaving and manage your load a little bit and we’re going to be implementing that this season. So that was one project. We did another project in Astoria, Queens also on the heating system side. And then I’ll talk about a cooling system we did. This was a project that we worked in concert with con Ed on as an r&d effort, to control radiator valves like at the valve level to actuate the valves on steam radiators. Yeah. It was one pipe steam system. SWA was involved this year, we just did an orifice plate replacement there as well. But you controlling thermostatically the valves in each apartment, in each room. And so we had thermostats that were communicating wirelessly to the valves and also wirelessly to the building management system. We tie that into the boiler system so that all the thermostats can report whether or not there they were calling for heat. Right? So that way was a good way of determining if we have demand, is there a demand for heat right now, if all the radiators are closed and nothing’s calling, we’re shutting off the boiler. So, it was just a better way to control the building, without impacting occupant comfort. However, that building needs to have its risers insulated. Another thing that we discovered in this process, it’s great if you could turn off all the radiators, but then suddenly you’re heating your building just through your riser piping.

Dave: (34:27)
So what we did is we install the system to do peak load shaving. Same concept as we were talking about on the heating side. But you know, during the summer months from the peak period, from one, 1:00 PM to 6:00 PM, we analyze the load of all of the units. We had meters on every single air handler and we had a meter on the cooling tower, so that we knew the kw in real time load of all the systems. So we did a predictive load control system where we watched, as we started to approach peak, it started to shed. The system intelligently reacted and would shed the second stage of the compressors on a select group of compressors. And then we rotate so that they would rotate through these compressors. So you wouldn’t hold them off for any length of time that could cause a noticeable comfort issue. But you would do it just enough to get three to four kw per compressor out of the peak so that you could shave that load in this case, you know, 50 to 75 kw.

Kelly: (35:27)
Okay, great. And did you look at all at, you know, in that context we kind of have energy consumption versus, maybe cycling of the compressors. Did you look at all at making, you know, you had minimum run time on for the compressors and making sure that you’re not short cycling?

Dave: (35:45)
Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. We would monitor the short cycling so that we’re not, you know, turning the units on and off constantly and there’ll be some delay times on the, on off cycles. So yeah, we were intelligently looking at that and controlling that properly and we were doing it holistically as well. So that way you can also do with this system is, you know, you don’t want to bang on all your compressors at the same time at 7:00 AM when everybody, you know, when all the air conditioners kick on at the same time, you want to stage them. So you can, you can build in intelligence staging of these units so that you don’t have a system where you get overloaded and you get a load spike and you know, that causes a peak demand issue.

Kelly: (36:24)
That’s awesome. Well, I could talk for hours and hours about energy efficiency, but I like to kind of wrap it up with the question of if we invite you back on this podcast in five years, what are we going to be talking about then?

Dave: (36:36)
Well in five years we’re going to be working in the field of artificial intelligence and the systems are going to start to self optimize. We’re going to have enough data. I mean, a lot of this comes down to how much data you’re collecting and how much you can interrogate and then learn from the Dataset. So you know, in in five years my goal at least for the company and where we want to go is to build real artificially intelligent building management systems that can continuously optimize the system and so that it doesn’t necessarily need human intervention and constant, you know, watching.

Kelly: (37:13)
Right. Great. And then as a side Gig, if you could work on my refrigerator that gets the milk from the store, that would be great.

Dave: (37:22)
Yeah, I would be happy to. Yeah, we’ll get the smart Samsung Fridge refrigerator working in your house.

Kelly: (37:26)
Great, thank you. Well thank you so much for coming out and being on the podcast.

Speaker 5: (37:30)
Thank you. 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.

Srikanth Puttagunta

Through his involvement with the Department of Energy’s Building America Research Program, Sri has an extensive background in barriers and challenges that residential builders and multifamily developers face to meet the requirements of codes and higher efficiency programs. He performs design reviews and building forensic investigations, identifies energy saving opportunities, quantifies the associated energy and cost savings, provides technical consulting, and supports measurement and verification of long-term energy savings. In addition, Sri has been involved in several of SWA’s product development efforts and also collaborates with industry partners on enhancements to their mechanical system product offerings.

Buying a home can be overwhelming. There are many factors that need to be considered and decisions that need to be made. For many Americans, aesthetics often outweigh certain characteristics critical to a home’s success, such as health, comfort, and efficiency.

To help us evaluate these critical characteristics, we’ve asked SWA’s COO and Mechanical Engineer, Srikanth Puttagunta, to walk us through his recent home-buying experience. Sri discusses ways to maximize a home’s value by taking advantage of incentives, enhancing existing infrastructure, and making the key decisions that may benefit your family’s health and comfort for years come. Join us as we dive into the essentials of single-family home ownership. 

Learn more about Sri’s home improvement projects in our Party Walls Blog!

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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

Robb: (00:21)
and before we get into this week’s episode, we wanted to let you know about a couple of upcoming events. Dylan Martello, who is a passive house consultant here at SWA, and is really instrumental in putting this podcast together, helping to produce the podcast. He’s going to be speaking at both of these conferences and he’ll give you a little bit of Info about them.

Dylan: (00:40)
Thanks Robb. The first is building energy NYC conference taking place on October 3rd and fourth in New York City. The conference which is presented by Northeast Sustainable Energy Association or NESEA, has become a staple for professionals and practitioners in the field of high performance building energy efficiency and renewable energy. We’ve been to the building energy conferences for many years now and my colleagues and I are looking forward to returning for another great event. Visit NESEA.org for more info.

Robb: (01:09)
Yeah, I’ve been involved with NESEA for 20 years or so and they’re really good people and I’ve learned tons at NESEA conferences over the years.

Dylan: (01:17)
Next is the North American Passive House Network Conference and expo taking place at the David l Lauren’s convention center in Pittsburgh, Pa. Join us October 17th through the 21st where we’ll be speaking on a variety of topics related to passive house visit naphnconference.com for more info.

Robb: (01:35)
Thanks Dylan.

Kelly: (01:37)
Are you interested in becoming a certified passive house designer or consultant? Checkout North American passive house network’s five day training in various locations across the nation and every other month in New York City. See Their website for an updated schedule.

Kelly: (01:54)
Welcome everyone. I’m very excited about today. It’s a little bit of an indulgence for me because I am actually working on some planning, some renovations for my own house. And so I have Sri Puttagunta on from Steven winter associates. He’s a mechanical engineer and focuses on residential home consulting. Mostly on the HVHC and mechanical side. He’s also done a lot of residential research initiatives for different programs, building America, and various other programs. And today we’re going to take a little bit of a personal tone and talk about renovations that he’s done on his own house. So let’s just jump right in.

Kelly: (02:37)
So Sri, thank you for being on the podcast. I wanted you to talk a little bit about a switch that you had made in your life. I let everybody know a little bit about your background in the built environment in the residential sector and you bought a house and turned the tables and now you are the client. So tell me a little bit about what that was like.

Sri: (03:04)
Yeah. A couple of years ago I was living in a townhouse and had to deal with condos issues and not really be able to touch much in my house, and decided to move out to the burbs. And we ended up purchasing a 1960 split level home. And while it had some nice updates in it from an aesthetic standpoint, it was your typical 1960s home in terms of everything that we love in terms of energy efficiency, and health. So it was an interesting process. One of the main things, was this was probably the first time we actually got into being the client. So everything I’ve done has always been on the consulting side and it’s easy to tell somebody what to do, especially when it’s not your money. But in this case it’s both being the client and the consultant. And of course I can see the bottom dollar. So it was really quite interesting in that aspect. And like every other project you have to sort of make your selections of what you want to do, what you might do later on and what you’re just going to have to skip for this project.

Kelly: (04:14)
Yeah. And I’d love to get into all of that, but first, do you want to give me a little basic overview of some of the things that you did in your renovations?

Sri: (04:26)
Sure. The house itself is right around 1600 square feet, it is as I’ve mentioned, a split level. And the main things we focused on originally was, the envelope. So first things where: it had essentially R4 degraded insulation in it. And we are looking at different ways to insulate that both in the walls and then also looking at the roof through the process of doing this. And one of the interesting thing is, we actually found that there was a very large pest infestation in the house. So mice, dead mice literally everywhere. Roof ceiling, basement, it was pretty bad. So We figured this is a perfect opportunity. We’ll do air sealing, we’ll do the installation, and we’ll be able to take care of the pest problem as well. So that was the main thing that we did.

Sri: (05:21)
We did dense packed cellulose into the exterior walls and then a close spell spray foam in the ceiling. So just because it was in most cases a pitched roof, vaulted ceiling, we wanted to get a high enough R value in the ceiling. And so we did add the roof deck itself. Some of the other things- the home was originally an oil boiler. And when we first were looking for house, I was absolutely against an oil house. I’d said no way. And when we put in the offer for the house, I was standing the street and there’s a gas line in the street and I called the utility company like, I don’t have gas, it’s on the street. And they said, no, you don’t have gas in your street. I was like, I’m literally standing on the valve.

Sri: (06:10)
And I took some while, but I finally got them to come out and they’re like, oh yeah, you have gas. And so we were able to get gas connected to the house. So we did some improvements in terms of the old existing boiler updating it to a tankless boiler. We kept the radiant baseboards. I didn’t feel like doing any traditional drywall work, so I said, hey, if we want to use it, we can have it. There were some through wall AC units in the house. But I was looking for something a little better than that. And again, part of trying to air seal through all units really don’t cut it. So we actually included a multipart air source heat pump in that house as well. Because it’s split level, we really didn’t have an opportunity to put duct work, so using the individual heads a lot is to get zoning as we wanted to meet our cooling needs.

Kelly: (07:04)
That’s awesome. And I think you told me a story that I thought was a really interesting anecdote about how you had called the people that used to live at your house and they had some issues with their children, they had asthma symptoms while they were in the house and when they left, they didn’t really have those symptoms anymore.

Sri: (07:23)
Yeah, when we started doing inspections and everything and we found all sort of issues with mice, there was feces everywhere. And so anywhere we were going, we were vacuuming everything up and that’s when I just, I’d had caught some information from the previous homeowners cause I was curious about their utility costs and stuff. So I had their information and I just sort of had an offhanded comment with them to talk about health. And I was just like, you know, it seems like there’s a lot of sort of pest issues in the house. Did your kids ever have any issues? And they had talked about the kids, which were in I think were five, seven years old. And they said, yeah, they were having a lot of asthma issues. And then I said, you know, I might understand why they’re having asthma issues. And they also just off handily mentioned that they sort of were reduced once they moved away. They moved into a new construction house, which didn’t have the same issues as their previous house. So it was definitely high on our list to take care of, as one of the priorities for any of the work we were doing

Kelly: (08:32)
for your own family. And you’d mentioned kind of in the beginning a little bit about challenges with budgeting. Do you want to talk about what specific examples you have that came up that were issues that you maybe didn’t predict in the beginning?

Sri: (08:47)
I mean, one of them, you always under budget, you think everything should be cheaper than it really is. Once you get into and you see all the details and you want to do a high quality job, it ends up taking more than you originally estimate. But one of the big things that I really wanted to originally do was adding exterior rigid insulation to the home. So I figured it’s two by four walls. If I dense packet, I’m getting into maybe R15, I can do a little better than that by putting an inch of rigid on exterior. So it made perfect sense. But once we pulled down the siding and we’re starting to look at it, we had done the dense pack of the cellulose from exterior actually. we didn’t want to actually take down any of the interior dry wall.

Sri: (09:29)
So we’re able to do most of it not being so intrusive to the interior of the home. But when doing that, we actually noticed the windows on half of the house we’re essentially retrofit windows that they installed at a later date. And the way they installed it was actually incorrect. And so we were actually having water that was draining back into the wall cavity. so wasn’t something we originally anticipating having to deal with in terms of cost. And so we ended up doing a tradeoff there of buying half house of new windows and eliminating the rigid insulation.

Kelly: (10:07)
Okay. Interesting. And did you find big issues? I mean, windows are obviously supposed to keep the water out, not funnel it into the wall cavity. So was there any major issues from that?

Sri: (10:18)
we were fortunate. I guess one of the things with old 1960 homes is that they’re very leaky, so if they get wet, they dry out pretty quickly. so there was some evidence of water damage, but the real extent of it was really just changing some couple pieces of plywood to the exterior. so there wasn’t anything drastic.

Kelly: (10:40)
But obviously the windows added a lot of costs?

Sri: (10:40)
Yeah. And especially with us insulating and tightening up the home, it would have been a serious issue moving forward if we would have left it the same way cause It wouldn’t have dried out.

Kelly: (10:53)
Right. And did you look at any monitoring? Do you know how much energy consumption was reduced by your retrofit?

Sri: (11:04)
Yeah. So because we’re energy Geeks, certainly I wanted to know sort of everything about it. So as I mentioned, we reached out to the previous homeowners to get their utility bills. so we actually got two years of their utility bills and they are running roughly $7,000 a year for all their utilities. And we’d done modeling, but I really wanted to know a little deeper how much energy we would be using. so we had our own utility bills after a year, but I was curious really exactly where we’re doing it. So, we installed an energy monitoring system on our electric panel, and we took it a little extreme. So rather than just doing the whole house and the solar, we actually went to do every single circuit breaker, you know, just little bit of overkill, but I was curious. and so we ended up getting a lot of interesting data. I can certainly tell the patterns of my family and what they’re doing. Very typical.

Kelly: (12:08)
When your children are out of bed, when they’re not supposed to be ?

Sri: (12:11)
I can tell when he’s turning on the TV without me knowing

Kelly: (12:14)
side benefits.

Sri: (12:16)
But in the end, after the year of a monitoring and looking at utility bills, we were roughly 1500 annually. So it was a huge difference.

Kelly: (12:26)
seven Thousand to 1500. wow

Sri: (12:28)
Part of that is converting fuels. So we did switch from oil to natural gas, but a large portion of that is energy savings and then solar generation.

Kelly: (12:39)
Right. That’s great. Did you get any incentives for any of the work, solar or otherwise?

Sri: (12:46)
So we actually got, between state utility centers and federal tax credit, we got roughly half of the solar cost of the solar system covered by incentives. And then we got probably another 10% of cost for insulation windows, high efficiency, mechanical equipment. And one of the interesting things is, my house was the case study that we used to get the Connecticut multiport heat pump incentive. So prior to that, they only did a single air source heat pump, just a one to one unit. That’s what they incentivized. And I actually had a single outdoor unit to multiple heads inside and they said, well, you just get the incentive for one. I said that doesn’t make sense. And then they said, well, you can put as many, you know, one-to-one combinations as you want and get the incentive for each one that way. It’s like, what’s the difference? multiport or single, it should essentially be the same and I don’t want to have, you know, four outdoor condensing units for no reason. So we actually worked with the utilities to revise their incentive program and we got incentivized.

Kelly: (14:09)
There you go. That’s great benefits of being the client and the consultant at the same time. Did you do anything in terms of automation? We hear a lot about smart thermostats and learning thermostats and did you do anything in that world?

Sri: (14:29)
Absolutely not. I have enough frustrations in the day dealing with my computer at work and having to do control, delete and resets and network issues. And when I get home, I really don’t want to have to deal with another computer. I like a simple light switch. If I want light on, I’ll turn it on. We kept the most basic thermostats. they are programmable but I don’t program them. we did all the work to make it an efficient house and I just set it to what temperature I want and then it runs.

Kelly: (15:07)
do you set it back manually during the day when you’re at work?

Sri: (15:10)
No. I mean we set a higher cooling set point than probably most people. But I like it that way. So we’re not over cooling it during the day, but it’s just a simple, I want to at 68 degrees in the winter, 78/77 degrees in the summer. Let it be.

Kelly: (15:31)
Awesome. Is there any difference between before you did this retrofit yourself and after in how you work with your clients or recommendations that you make to them?

Sri: (15:45)
Certainly, working with the Department of Energy’s Building American program, it’s very much heavily focused on energy savings. Looking at site or source energy, but it’s Btu saved, kwh saved. And that sort of the main metric that we’re using and a lot of times for clients, it was always about the return on investment, simple paybacks, everything was sort of about the energy-saved aspect to it. And going through this process, especially on sort of the health side of it, made it very clear to me that the way we present the value of a lot of these improvements needs to change. And so certainly health is one of the key ones that I focus on when trying to explain certain decisions. And it may not have a direct monetary payback, right? But productivity, long-term health, there’s a huge value to that. And then the other one is certainly comfort, its huge one that we always want.

Sri: (16:56)
You can always get comfortable with the house that sort of doesn’t work exactly as you want after a couple of years, but why? If you can make it comfortable for you rather than you adjusting to it, take the time to do it. And then the last one is really one I hadn’t really thought about before, which was noise. And making stuff a little tighter. Getting more insulation in the walls. The sound level significantly changes also. And so, especially with a lot of our high end clients, noise control or abatement is just as important as a lot of the other aspects that we’re trying to pitch to them. And so taking all those together, you can make a much fuller case to make a large investment into projects, rather than just focusing on energy.

Kelly: (17:47)
Right. Yeah, I think that’s really interesting and I’ve definitely come across a lot more of a focus on noise recently. And I don’t know if our equipment has gotten noisier or people are just more attuned or are less comfortable with just giving into the noisy equipment. So that’s really interesting anecdote. Was there anything that you didn’t do that you regret? That you might go back and change later?

Sri: (18:22)
I mean one we talked about was the exterior rich installation. And again, for that one, I think I do it more so than anything. I mean, I’m comfortable in the house, but from some other projects I’ve been on I’m certain there’s a noise benefit of having the exterior rich insulation. So I’ve gotten used to it, but you know, every morning we’re very much woken up by the birds chirping outside, and it’s like, well, it’s sort of nice alarm clock, but it’s sometimes it’s like, hmm, don’t really want that on a Saturday or Sunday morning.

Kelly: (18:54)
You want to wait for your own alarm clock.

Sri: (18:55)
The other big one is probably actually one that I’ve done quite a bit of research on. And so that was actually our kitchen range. The previous homeowners had done pretty extensive update on the kitchen, so I though it’s done. I don’t have to do anything more to it. But it was a microwave fan, and so its beautifully laid out, but it has a microwave over the range. And so I was like, oh, what are we going to do here? And it’s a vaulted ceiling, so you know, running a pipe also through the voltage, is just not aesthetically going to look nice, but we were able to figure out a way to duct it to the outside within the wall cavity. So it’s still a microwave range, but it is ducted to the outside. so it’s an improvement. It’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement.

Kelly: (19:52)
Yeah. Yeah. And I would just bring up at this point that the NREL study that looked at particulates and exhaust and things given off by everybody’s range.

Sri: (20:07)
Yeah. Aldehydes, particulate matter, Formaldehyde. Yeah.

Kelly: (20:12)
And that they recommend a minimum of, I think 200 cfm exhausts?

Sri: (20:18)
somewhere in the 200 to 300 cfm range, and a variable speed one, but it’s there on the Max range. If you have that along with the very good capture hood. So you really want a hood that extends all the way over your burners. If you could do that, that’s CFM range works fairly well.

Kelly: (20:38)
Great. Yeah. And I think they showed that a significant number of houses in the state of New York I think where the range was not operating properly

Sri: (20:50)
range doesn’t operate properly and people don’t turn them on. I mean, for it to be effective, you got to turn it on.

Kelly: (20:56)
That is an excellent point. And speaking of ranges, what are your thoughts on induction stoves?

Sri: (21:04)
So this is one project that I’m still trying to convince my wife of. originally it was a propane range and we converted it back to natural gas once we got that line. but two out of the four burners don’t work. and so we’re like, it’s time to replace it and doing sort of the studies looking at different things, I’ve sort of gone towards the induction idea. So we don’t allow combustion, burning a combustion gas anywhere in our house. It’s all sealed combustion at this point except for ranges just because we like it for cooking aesthetic. And so we’re really looking at moving to induction range. The main difference really is the pot selection and the amount of stuff that’s available now, I even have a cast iron pan that works for inductions. So I think that’s the route we’re going to be going and it will take care of some of the additional pollutants that we have to deal with when cooking.

Kelly: (22:19)
Right. Great. Yeah. And I think gas stoves are a big issue with passive house and I know that we have another episode on Passive House and Lois is not a big fan of those either. So, I also want to reference something that we’ve talked about, is the value of these improvements. And I know you wrote a blog post about the value of energy efficiency improvements on your house in terms of market value. can you talk a little bit about that and what your thoughts are?

Sri: (22:52)
The value or the lack of value? it’s one of the things that the department of Energy and the appraisal associations are all starting to get on board with this. the number of homes that have now been rated as energy star has gone into capacity where it’s starting to make an impact in the market. So people are actually considering HERS index energy efficiency and seeing a benefit from it. so you’re starting to see it creep into stuff. but you certainly have still the case of aesthetics upgrades, being the primary driver of what the price is. I just read an article the other day, if you paint your front door a gray blue color, you’ll add $6,000 worth of value to your house. And I was like, but I just put a generator. Did I get $6,000 worth of benefit back? Or I improved my boiler and I might get the cost of it back, but did I get $6,000 back? Ya know? It really hasn’t got to that point yet. But the bigger part I think that’s going to start getting into it is as we get more familiar with the health aspects of stuff, that’s going to have a huge impact on how we really value these homes.

Kelly: (24:15)
Yeah. I think that’s a great point. And I’ll, I’ll end on: if we are talking in five years on this podcast when we’re still around, of course, what would we be talking about then?

Sri: (24:34)
I’m guessing we’re going to all be living in domes electrochromic windows that will change depending on. No, I’m kidding

Kelly: (24:42)
Ah, you have a lot of big hopes for the next five years

Sri: (24:49)
We’re going to be talking about the same stuff. The big part that we’re doing is rather than being sort of on the leading edge, the early adopters, it’s going to be mainstream. So energy star is now getting more of a foothold, you’ll then start seeing passive house zero energy ready homes. All those things are going to start becoming what is demanded by the market rather than the nice extra feature that somebody does. And that’s really where I think the markets going to be going.

Kelly: (25:17)
That’s awesome. Great. Thank you so much for being on buildings and beyond.

Speaker 6: (25:25)
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.

Buying a home can be overwhelming. There are many factors that need to be considered and decisions that need to be made. For many Americans, aesthetics often outweigh certain characteristics critical to a home’s success, such as health, comfort, and efficiency.

To help us evaluate these critical characteristics, we’ve asked SWA’s COO and Mechanical Engineer, Srikanth Puttagunta, to walk us through his recent home-buying experience. Sri discusses ways to maximize a home’s value by taking advantage of incentives, enhancing existing infrastructure, and making the key decisions that may benefit your family’s health and comfort for years come. Join us as we dive into the essentials of single-family home ownership. 

Episode Guests: Srikanth Puttagunta

Through his involvement with the Department of Energy’s Building America Research Program, Sri has an extensive background in barriers and challenges that residential builders and multifamily developers face to meet the requirements of codes and higher efficiency programs. He performs design reviews and building forensic investigations, identifies energy saving opportunities, quantifies the associated energy and cost savings, provides technical consulting, and supports measurement and verification of long-term energy savings. In addition, Sri has been involved in several of SWA’s product development efforts and also collaborates with industry partners on enhancements to their mechanical system product offerings.

Learn more about Sri’s home improvement projects in our Party Walls Blog!

Programs and Studies Discussed:

Federal Incentives:

CT Incentives:

BuildingEnergy NYC, October 3-4

The BuildingEnergy NYC Conference + Trade Show is NYC’s premier event for professionals and practitioners in the fields of high-performance building, energy efficiency, and renewable energy. SWA will have various speakers presenting on an array of building energy topics. Come visit us! 

NAPHN Conference, October 17-21

Join North America’s Passive House community as it convenes in a surprising hotspot of Passive House design and construction: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. SWA has four sessions at the NAPHN conference on a variety of Passive House topics. Hope to see you there!

NAPHN’s Certified Passive House Designer or Consultant training

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

Send your feedback and questions to [email protected]

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

Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby

Heather Breslin | Alex Mirabile | Dylan Martello

Smart Buildings 

Guest: Dave Unger

CLICK HERE TO LEARN HOW TO SUBSCRIBE

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

Robb:                                00:21                   and before we get into this week’s episode, we wanted to let you know about a couple of upcoming events. Dylan Martello, who is a passive house consultant here at SWA, and is really instrumental in putting this podcast together, helping to produce the podcast. He’s going to be speaking at both of these conferences and he’ll give you a little bit of Info about them.

Dylan:                                00:40                   Thanks Robb. The first is building energy NYC conference taking place on October 3rd and fourth in New York City. The conference which is presented by Northeast Sustainable Energy Association or NESEA, has become a staple for professionals and practitioners in the field of high performance building energy efficiency and renewable energy. We’ve been to the building energy conferences for many years now and my colleagues and I are looking forward to returning for another great event. Visit NESEA.org for more info.

Robb:                                01:09                   Yeah, I’ve been involved with NESEA for 20 years or so and they’re really good people and I’ve learned tons at NESEA conferences over the years.

Dylan:                                01:17                   Next is the North American Passive House Network Conference and expo taking place at the David l Lauren’s convention center in Pittsburgh, Pa. Join us October 17th through the 21st where we’ll be speaking on a variety of topics related to passive house visit naphnconference.com for more info.

Robb:                                01:35                   Thanks Dylan.

Kelly:                                  01:37                   Are you interested in becoming a certified passive house designer or consultant? Checkout North American passive house network’s five day training in various locations across the nation and every other month in New York City. See Their website for an updated schedule.

Kelly:                                  01:54                   Welcome everyone. I’m very excited about today. It’s a little bit of an indulgence for me because I am actually working on some planning, some renovations for my own house. And so I have Sri Puttagunta on from Steven winter associates. He’s a mechanical engineer and focuses on residential home consulting. Mostly on the HVHC and mechanical side. He’s also done a lot of residential research initiatives for different programs, building America, and various other programs. And today we’re going to take a little bit of a personal tone and talk about renovations that he’s done on his own house. So let’s just jump right in.

Kelly:                                  02:37                   So Sri, thank you for being on the podcast. I wanted you to talk a little bit about a switch that you had made in your life. I let everybody know a little bit about your background in the built environment in the residential sector and you bought a house and turned the tables and now you are the client. So tell me a little bit about what that was like.

Sri:                                     03:04                   Yeah. A couple of years ago I was living in a townhouse and had to deal with condos issues and not really be able to touch much in my house, and decided to move out to the burbs. And we ended up purchasing a 1960 split level home. And while it had some nice updates in it from an aesthetic standpoint, it was your typical 1960s home in terms of everything that we love in terms of energy efficiency, and health. So it was an interesting process. One of the main things, was this was probably the first time we actually got into being the client. So everything I’ve done has always been on the consulting side and it’s easy to tell somebody what to do, especially when it’s not your money. But in this case it’s both being the client and the consultant. And of course I can see the bottom dollar. So it was really quite interesting in that aspect. And like every other project you have to sort of make your selections of what you want to do, what you might do later on and what you’re just going to have to skip for this project.

Kelly:                                  04:14                   Yeah. And I’d love to get into all of that, but first, do you want to give me a little basic overview of some of the things that you did in your renovations?

Sri:                                     04:26                   Sure. The house itself is right around 1600 square feet, it is as I’ve mentioned, a split level. And the main things we focused on originally was, the envelope. So first things where: it had essentially R4 degraded insulation in it. And we are looking at different ways to insulate that both in the walls and then also looking at the roof through the process of doing this. And one of the interesting thing is, we actually found that there was a very large pest infestation in the house. So mice, dead mice literally everywhere. Roof ceiling, basement, it was pretty bad. So We figured this is a perfect opportunity. We’ll do air sealing, we’ll do the installation, and we’ll be able to take care of the pest problem as well. So that was the main thing that we did.

Sri:                                     05:21                   We did dense packed cellulose into the exterior walls and then a close spell spray foam in the ceiling. So just because it was in most cases a pitched roof, vaulted ceiling, we wanted to get a high enough R value in the ceiling. And so we did add the roof deck itself. Some of the other things- the home was originally an oil boiler. And when we first were looking for house, I was absolutely against an oil house. I’d said no way. And when we put in the offer for the house, I was standing the street and there’s a gas line in the street and I called the utility company like, I don’t have gas, it’s on the street. And they said, no, you don’t have gas in your street. I was like, I’m literally standing on the valve.

Sri:                                     06:10                   And I took some while, but I finally got them to come out and they’re like, oh yeah, you have gas. And so we were able to get gas connected to the house. So we did some improvements in terms of the old existing boiler updating it to a tankless boiler. We kept the radiant baseboards. I didn’t feel like doing any traditional drywall work, so I said, hey, if we want to use it, we can have it. There were some through wall AC units in the house. But I was looking for something a little better than that. And again, part of trying to air seal through all units really don’t cut it. So we actually included a multipart air source heat pump in that house as well. Because it’s split level, we really didn’t have an opportunity to put duct work, so using the individual heads a lot is to get zoning as we wanted to meet our cooling needs.

Kelly:                                  07:04                   That’s awesome. And I think you told me a story that I thought was a really interesting anecdote about how you had called the people that used to live at your house and they had some issues with their children, they had asthma symptoms while they were in the house and when they left, they didn’t really have those symptoms anymore.

Sri:                                     07:23                   Yeah, when we started doing inspections and everything and we found all sort of issues with mice, there was feces everywhere. And so anywhere we were going, we were vacuuming everything up and that’s when I just, I’d had caught some information from the previous homeowners cause I was curious about their utility costs and stuff. So I had their information and I just sort of had an offhanded comment with them to talk about health. And I was just like, you know, it seems like there’s a lot of sort of pest issues in the house. Did your kids ever have any issues? And they had talked about the kids, which were in I think were five, seven years old. And they said, yeah, they were having a lot of asthma issues. And then I said, you know, I might understand why they’re having asthma issues. And they also just off handily mentioned that they sort of were reduced once they moved away. They moved into a new construction house, which didn’t have the same issues as their previous house. So it was definitely high on our list to take care of, as one of the priorities for any of the work we were doing

Kelly:                                  08:32                   for your own family. And you’d mentioned kind of in the beginning a little bit about challenges with budgeting. Do you want to talk about what specific examples you have that came up that were issues that you maybe didn’t predict in the beginning?

Sri:                                     08:47                   I mean, one of them, you always under budget, you think everything should be cheaper than it really is. Once you get into and you see all the details and you want to do a high quality job, it ends up taking more than you originally estimate. But one of the big things that I really wanted to originally do was adding exterior rigid insulation to the home. So I figured it’s two by four walls. If I dense packet, I’m getting into maybe R15, I can do a little better than that by putting an inch of rigid on exterior. So it made perfect sense. But once we pulled down the siding and we’re starting to look at it, we had done the dense pack of the cellulose from exterior actually. we didn’t want to actually take down any of the interior dry wall.

Sri:                                     09:29                   So we’re able to do most of it not being so intrusive to the interior of the home. But when doing that, we actually noticed the windows on half of the house we’re essentially retrofit windows that they installed at a later date. And the way they installed it was actually incorrect. And so we were actually having water that was draining back into the wall cavity. so wasn’t something we originally anticipating having to deal with in terms of cost. And so we ended up doing a tradeoff there of buying half house of new windows and eliminating the rigid insulation.

Kelly:                                  10:07                   Okay. Interesting. And did you find big issues? I mean, windows are obviously supposed to keep the water out, not funnel it into the wall cavity. So was there any major issues from that?

Sri:                                     10:18                   we were fortunate. I guess one of the things with old 1960 homes is that they’re very leaky, so if they get wet, they dry out pretty quickly. so there was some evidence of water damage, but the real extent of it was really just changing some couple pieces of plywood to the exterior. so there wasn’t anything drastic.

Kelly:                                  10:40                   But obviously the windows added a lot of costs?

Sri:                                     10:40                   Yeah. And especially with us insulating and tightening up the home, it would have been a serious issue moving forward if we would have left it the same way cause It wouldn’t have dried out.

Kelly:                                  10:53                   Right. And did you look at any monitoring? Do you know how much energy consumption was reduced by your retrofit?

Sri:                                     11:04                   Yeah. So because we’re energy Geeks, certainly I wanted to know sort of everything about it. So as I mentioned, we reached out to the previous homeowners to get their utility bills. so we actually got two years of their utility bills and they are running roughly $7,000 a year for all their utilities. And we’d done modeling, but I really wanted to know a little deeper how much energy we would be using. so we had our own utility bills after a year, but I was curious really exactly where we’re doing it. So, we installed an energy monitoring system on our electric panel, and we took it a little extreme. So rather than just doing the whole house and the solar, we actually went to do every single circuit breaker, you know, just little bit of overkill, but I was curious. and so we ended up getting a lot of interesting data. I can certainly tell the patterns of my family and what they’re doing. Very typical.

Kelly:                                  12:08                   When your children are out of bed, when they’re not supposed to be ?

Sri:                                     12:11                   I can tell when he’s turning on the TV without me knowing

Kelly:                                  12:14                   side benefits.

Sri:                                     12:16                   But in the end, after the year of a monitoring and looking at utility bills, we were roughly 1500 annually. So it was a huge difference.

Kelly:                                  12:26                   seven Thousand to 1500. wow

Sri:                                     12:28                   Part of that is converting fuels. So we did switch from oil to natural gas, but a large portion of that is energy savings and then solar generation.

Kelly:                                  12:39                   Right. That’s great. Did you get any incentives for any of the work, solar or otherwise?

Sri:                                     12:46                   So we actually got, between state utility centers and federal tax credit, we got roughly half of the solar cost of the solar system covered by incentives. And then we got probably another 10% of cost for insulation windows, high efficiency, mechanical equipment. And one of the interesting things is, my house was the case study that we used to get the Connecticut multiport heat pump incentive. So prior to that, they only did a single air source heat pump, just a one to one unit. That’s what they incentivized. And I actually had a single outdoor unit to multiple heads inside and they said, well, you just get the incentive for one. I said that doesn’t make sense. And then they said, well, you can put as many, you know, one-to-one combinations as you want and get the incentive for each one that way. It’s like, what’s the difference? multiport or single, it should essentially be the same and I don’t want to have, you know, four outdoor condensing units for no reason. So we actually worked with the utilities to revise their incentive program and we got incentivized.

Kelly:                                  14:09                   There you go. That’s great benefits of being the client and the consultant at the same time. Did you do anything in terms of automation? We hear a lot about smart thermostats and learning thermostats and did you do anything in that world?

Sri:                                     14:29                   Absolutely not. I have enough frustrations in the day dealing with my computer at work and having to do control, delete and resets and network issues. And when I get home, I really don’t want to have to deal with another computer. I like a simple light switch. If I want light on, I’ll turn it on. We kept the most basic thermostats. they are programmable but I don’t program them. we did all the work to make it an efficient house and I just set it to what temperature I want and then it runs.

Kelly:                                  15:07                   do you set it back manually during the day when you’re at work?

Sri:                                     15:10                   No. I mean we set a higher cooling set point than probably most people. But I like it that way. So we’re not over cooling it during the day, but it’s just a simple, I want to at 68 degrees in the winter, 78/77 degrees in the summer. Let it be.

Kelly:                                  15:31                   Awesome. Is there any difference between before you did this retrofit yourself and after in how you work with your clients or recommendations that you make to them?

Sri:                                     15:45                   Certainly, working with the Department of Energy’s Building American program, it’s very much heavily focused on energy savings. Looking at site or source energy, but it’s Btu saved, kwh saved. And that sort of the main metric that we’re using and a lot of times for clients, it was always about the return on investment, simple paybacks, everything was sort of about the energy-saved aspect to it. And going through this process, especially on sort of the health side of it, made it very clear to me that the way we present the value of a lot of these improvements needs to change. And so certainly health is one of the key ones that I focus on when trying to explain certain decisions. And it may not have a direct monetary payback, right? But productivity, long-term health, there’s a huge value to that. And then the other one is certainly comfort, its huge one that we always want.

Sri:                                     16:56                   You can always get comfortable with the house that sort of doesn’t work exactly as you want after a couple of years, but why? If you can make it comfortable for you rather than you adjusting to it, take the time to do it. And then the last one is really one I hadn’t really thought about before, which was noise. And making stuff a little tighter. Getting more insulation in the walls. The sound level significantly changes also. And so, especially with a lot of our high end clients, noise control or abatement is just as important as a lot of the other aspects that we’re trying to pitch to them. And so taking all those together, you can make a much fuller case to make a large investment into projects, rather than just focusing on energy.

Kelly:                                  17:47                   Right. Yeah, I think that’s really interesting and I’ve definitely come across a lot more of a focus on noise recently. And I don’t know if our equipment has gotten noisier or people are just more attuned or are less comfortable with just giving into the noisy equipment. So that’s really interesting anecdote. Was there anything that you didn’t do that you regret? That you might go back and change later?

Sri:                                     18:22                   I mean one we talked about was the exterior rich installation. And again, for that one, I think I do it more so than anything. I mean, I’m comfortable in the house, but from some other projects I’ve been on I’m certain there’s a noise benefit of having the exterior rich insulation. So I’ve gotten used to it, but you know, every morning we’re very much woken up by the birds chirping outside, and it’s like, well, it’s sort of nice alarm clock, but it’s sometimes it’s like, hmm, don’t really want that on a Saturday or Sunday morning.

Kelly:                                  18:54                   You want to wait for your own alarm clock.

Sri:                                     18:55                   The other big one is probably actually one that I’ve done quite a bit of research on. And so that was actually our kitchen range. The previous homeowners had done pretty extensive update on the kitchen, so I though it’s done. I don’t have to do anything more to it. But it was a microwave fan, and so its beautifully laid out, but it has a microwave over the range. And so I was like, oh, what are we going to do here? And it’s a vaulted ceiling, so you know, running a pipe also through the voltage, is just not aesthetically going to look nice, but we were able to figure out a way to duct it to the outside within the wall cavity. So it’s still a microwave range, but it is ducted to the outside. so it’s an improvement. It’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement.

Kelly:                                  19:52                   Yeah. Yeah. And I would just bring up at this point that the NREL study that looked at particulates and exhaust and things given off by everybody’s range.

Sri:                                     20:07                   Yeah. Aldehydes, particulate matter, Formaldehyde. Yeah.

Kelly:                                  20:12                   And that they recommend a minimum of, I think 200 cfm exhausts?

Sri:                                     20:18                   somewhere in the 200 to 300 cfm range, and a variable speed one, but it’s there on the Max range. If you have that along with the very good capture hood. So you really want a hood that extends all the way over your burners. If you could do that, that’s CFM range works fairly well.

Kelly:                                  20:38                   Great. Yeah. And I think they showed that a significant number of houses in the state of New York I think where the range was not operating properly

Sri:                                     20:50                   range doesn’t operate properly and people don’t turn them on. I mean, for it to be effective, you got to turn it on.

Kelly:                                  20:56                   That is an excellent point. And speaking of ranges, what are your thoughts on induction stoves?

Sri:                                     21:04                   So this is one project that I’m still trying to convince my wife of. originally it was a propane range and we converted it back to natural gas once we got that line. but two out of the four burners don’t work. and so we’re like, it’s time to replace it and doing sort of the studies looking at different things, I’ve sort of gone towards the induction idea. So we don’t allow combustion, burning a combustion gas anywhere in our house. It’s all sealed combustion at this point except for ranges just because we like it for cooking aesthetic. And so we’re really looking at moving to induction range. The main difference really is the pot selection and the amount of stuff that’s available now, I even have a cast iron pan that works for inductions. So I think that’s the route we’re going to be going and it will take care of some of the additional pollutants that we have to deal with when cooking.

Kelly:                                  22:19                   Right. Great. Yeah. And I think gas stoves are a big issue with passive house and I know that we have another episode on Passive House and Lois is not a big fan of those either. So, I also want to reference something that we’ve talked about, is the value of these improvements. And I know you wrote a blog post about the value of energy efficiency improvements on your house in terms of market value. can you talk a little bit about that and what your thoughts are?

Sri:                                     22:52                   The value or the lack of value? it’s one of the things that the department of Energy and the appraisal associations are all starting to get on board with this. the number of homes that have now been rated as energy star has gone into capacity where it’s starting to make an impact in the market. So people are actually considering HERS index energy efficiency and seeing a benefit from it. so you’re starting to see it creep into stuff. but you certainly have still the case of aesthetics upgrades, being the primary driver of what the price is. I just read an article the other day, if you paint your front door a gray blue color, you’ll add $6,000 worth of value to your house. And I was like, but I just put a generator. Did I get $6,000 worth of benefit back? Or I improved my boiler and I might get the cost of it back, but did I get $6,000 back? Ya know? It really hasn’t got to that point yet. But the bigger part I think that’s going to start getting into it is as we get more familiar with the health aspects of stuff, that’s going to have a huge impact on how we really value these homes.

Kelly:                                  24:15                   Yeah. I think that’s a great point. And I’ll, I’ll end on: if we are talking in five years on this podcast when we’re still around, of course, what would we be talking about then?

Sri:                                     24:34                   I’m guessing we’re going to all be living in domes electrochromic windows that will change depending on. No, I’m kidding

Kelly:                                  24:42                   Ah, you have a lot of big hopes for the next five years

Sri:                                     24:49                   We’re going to be talking about the same stuff. The big part that we’re doing is rather than being sort of on the leading edge, the early adopters, it’s going to be mainstream. So energy star is now getting more of a foothold, you’ll then start seeing passive house zero energy ready homes. All those things are going to start becoming what is demanded by the market rather than the nice extra feature that somebody does. And that’s really where I think the markets going to be going.

Kelly:                                  25:17                   That’s awesome. Great. Thank you so much for being on buildings and beyond.

Speaker 6:                        25:25                   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.

Karla Butterfield

Karla Butterfield is a Sustainability Director at SWA, working with residential buildings. She has 25 years of experience, with expertise in sustainable consulting services, program certification support, and implementation of high performance building technologies. Read more

Paula Zimin

Paula Zimin is the Director of Sustainable Building Services at Steven Winter Associates (SWA). She specializes in professional architecture and design, with particular expertise in high performance design within the commercial and residential sectors.

Mainstream demand for highly efficient, resilient, and cost-effective buildings is greater than ever before. More people are looking to integrate zero energy design and construction strategies without having to sacrifice modern conveniences and amenities. So, how do we implement solutions that enable us to use less energy… without feeling like we’re using less energy?

To answer this question, we sit down with SWA sustainability experts, Paula Zimin and Karla Butterfield, to discuss what it means to achieve zero energy status and learn how we can accomplish this among various building typologies and sectors. Join us for this exciting and in-depth look at zero energy buildings! 

Definitions

Programs & Certifications

Reports

SWA Resources & Net-Zero Projects

Clarification: When Paula discusses the total source energy consumption of a building, she uses the number 38. This refers to 38 KBTUs (or 30,000 BTUs) per square foot, per year. This pertains to source energy, not site energy, and is also known as “primary energy” in Passive House. Although they are considered the same in Passive House, source energy and primary energy have subtle differences according to the EPA.

Correction: Karla mentioned a HERS 45 was a requirement for DOE’s ZERH program. This is not strictly true; the HERS target varies somewhat with climate and home size. A very large home in the Northeast might need to get a HERS index of 40 to comply, whereas a small home might need a HERS index of 52.

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

Robb: (00:21)
and before we get into this week’s episode, we wanted to let you know about a couple of upcoming events and Dylan Martello, who was a passive house consultant here at SWA and is really instrumental in putting this podcast together, helping to produce the podcast. He’s going to be speaking at both of these conferences and he’ll give you a little bit of Info about.

Dylan: (00:40)
Thanks Robb. The first is building energy NYC conference taking place on October 3rd and fourth in New York City. The conference, which is presented by Northeast Sustainable Energy Association or NESEA, n e s e a, has become a staple for professionals and practitioners in the field of high performance building, energy efficiency, and renewable energy. We’ve been to the building energy conferences for many years now and my colleagues and I are looking forward to returning for another great event. Visit NESEA.org For more info.

Robb: (01:09)
Yeah. I’ve been involved with NESEA for 20 years or so, and really good people and I’ve learned tons at NESEA conferences over the years.

Dylan: (01:17)
Next is the North American Passive House Network Conference and expo taking place at the David l Lauren’s convention center in Pittsburgh, Pa. Join US October 17th through the 21st where we’ll be speaking on a variety of topics related to passive house visit naphnconference.com for more info.

Robb: (01:35)
Thanks Dylan. This week we’re talking about zero energy buildings, ZEB’s which is an acronym, probably a lot of people hear or see more. I certainly do. It’s a big topic. We don’t get to the bottom of it, but we do our best. I’m talking with Paula Zimin who is director of sustainable building services here at Stephen Winter associates, she is an RA, but also does really a lot of energy modeling and she focuses on larger buildings, larger multifamily buildings, commercial buildings, and institutional buildings. And I’m also talking with Karla Butterfield, who is a sustainability director here at SWA and she’s all about residential from single family residential homes all the way up to large, tall multifamily buildings and everything in between. And she does a lot of work with certification programs, zero energy ready home, which we talk about here, LEED national green building standard among several others. So this episode really we talk about all types of buildings, small to large, different programs, different systems, different paradigms. And even, I think we started the episode with the discussion of different meanings of zero energy buildings. What does this really mean? So let’s get to the end.

Robb: (02:57)
Welcome Karla and Paula Thanks for being here. So zero energy buildings is a big topic. It’s, I think even getting into kind of the mass media. I see it in newspapers and stuff, not only in the magazines and journals and conferences I’ve been going to for a decade or whatever. So it’s a growing topic, growing in popularity. And you guys have certainly dabbled in it and it’s a growing trend.

Karla: (03:29)
I would say it was a Buzzword tenish years ago, where most people in the industry knew what zero energy buildings or zero energy construction meant, and then went through kind of a controversial period of what does that really mean and what do we really call it. But you’re right, it is in the mainstream now. And most people who are at all familiar with the built environment know what zero energy means.

Robb: (03:56)
So what does zero energy mean, Paula and zero energy building?

Paula: (04:00)
So I think in my world, because I work more in the commercial sector and larger buildings, zero energy buildings, gets limited to a building scale, which can be very difficult to do. So in my world, I think that we’re approaching zero energy on a broader scale at the community scale. So it’s certainly a low energy building a focus. There might not be the ability to get to zero energy, but there is certainly the drive to how can we as a community or a larger set of buildings get to zero.

Robb: (04:35)
So I mean it seems that at the core level we’re talking about very efficient buildings, very low energy needs, be it electricity or fossil fuel or wood or whatever low energy needs and you can meet all of those energy needs with renewable energy, wind or solar or whatever. That’s kind of the general idea?

Karla: (04:57)
That’s the general idea. A lot of people will argue there’s no such thing as a zero energy building because of the fact that you are using a fuel and so it’s really a net zero or net neutral fuel building.

Robb: (05:14)
So that was, yeah, so I’ve had people like jump down my throat when I say it’s a zero energy building and they say, no, no, no, no NET zero energy building. And I actually seriously don’t, I don’t understand that distinction

Karla: (05:24)
Right. And then saying net zero energy also is somewhat offensive to some people. So they want to say, you know, what we are is we’re, we’re neutral with fuel. So one fuel offsets the other.

Robb: (05:35)
So if you use some natural gas, you generate even more electricity from PV or something to offset that natural gas.

Karla: (05:44)
Right. And that’s easier to do in low rise buildings. Especially single family buildings are really small. Multifamily buildings, like Paula indicated. Harder to do in more commercial or high-rise buildings because you don’t have enough room for that PV to offset if it’s on your roof. There’s a lot of other solutions for that too. I’m sure you’re going to ask that question in a bit.

Paula: (06:04)
A lot of controversy is that even though you’re a net zero building, you’re still using the grid. And how does the grid get its energy? Usually through fossil fuels. So if you’re really talking about a carbon neutral building, that’s very hard to do from the building scale unless if your grid is carbon neutral. So unless if you’re grid is hydro or some other, you know, non fossil fuel source. So you could also be off the grid potentially to be carbon neutral. So it’s a difference between a net carbon neutral building versus a net zero energy building and your relationship with the grid.

Robb: (06:44)
Okay. Okay. So as a catch-all term “zero energy buildings, “you’re going to get disagreement about that?

Karla: (06:51)
It all comes down to how you want to define it. You have to define what zero energy means to you, whether it’s zero carbon, net zero, or some other sort of definition.

Robb: (07:06)
Which is not, they’re not necessarily zero energy costs.

Karla: (07:08)
I think to keep pushing this into the mainstream and have it be more than a buzz phrase, it has to be something catchy, which is why zero energy or zero energy buildings has caught on. Even though we can see there’s many layers

Robb: (07:22)
All right. Well there’s actually some papers. Maybe we can include in the show notes the different definitions if people want to dig into that more.

Paula: (07:30)
Sure. And I think that one of the definitions is either the modeling approach or the actual utility bills.

Robb: (07:36)
Oh good distinction. Right, right. So, and you guys both do a lot of energy modeling- and Karla, you’re, as you said, you focus on residential, single family all the way up to larger multifamily. And Paula, you’re on kind of larger multifamily and also commercial institutional, right? And Carla, it’s easier with single family. And you’ve worked on several?

Karla: (07:58)
I’ve worked on several single family or duplexes that have done either approaching zero or zero energy and we have verified it in a couple of different ways, both with an energy model and then with 14 to 16 months’ worth of utility bills to show that they actually were energy cost neutral or negative in some cases. And for other projects just with the energy model that either predicted the usage and then test it out and gave it what we all know is the HERS index, the Home Energy Rating score index to indicate that it could be a zero energy building.

Robb: (08:32)
So I’m sure we’ll get into this in future podcasts, but the HERS index, you know, a 100 is kind of like a mediocre average home and zero is theoretically a zero energy home. So lower is better

Paula: (08:45)
lower is better. And in the northeast where we do most of our consulting anyway with the zero energy stuff, we have to get down somewhere around 40 or maybe even 35 to get to kind of the sweet spot to then put on Pv to get the HERS index to zero.

Robb: (09:01)
All right, interesting. So what do you do? Those homes that have a HERS index of 30 or 45 before and in renewable energy, right? What systems do you see?

Paula: (09:11)
Right. So, and we see this in the single family homes and duplexes and also the low rise multifamily. We’ve done a couple of projects, one in Ithaca and we have a few more on the drawing board that had been successful from 15 units in four stories to 60 units in three stories. Strategies are kind of similar. It’s usually a high efficiency assembly. And that can be either a double stud wall so that we’re doubling up on the insulation value or some rigid insulation on the exterior of the wall that’s then put siding over it. So obviously you don’t see it. So that’d be a high efficiency or a high performing wall assembly. And then in most cases we’re looking at triple pane windows. And then the roof in our region has to be really well insulated, sometimes as high as an R90. In some cases we can be closer to 60, but we’ve had projects that have had to go as high as 90 in the attics or on the flat roofs

Robb: (10:04)
These are like passive house backs where some of these passive houses that got to zero energy?

Paula: (10:09)
Yeah. So the Ithaca project I mentioned, the rest of the community, the duplexes and single family homes, some of them are passive house certified. Several of them were LEED for home certified. All of them were energy star, indoor air plus and the doe zero energy ready home program. And then the multifamily, the 15 unit, followed all the protocols but didn’t go through the certification processes.

Robb: (10:30)
Okay. So programs, that’s another question for both of you. Zero energy programs. You mentioned zero energy ready home, which I always stumble over that name. That’s DOE. And that is in a nutshell- Can you give us?

Paula: (10:48)
In a nutshell, that is a high performing apartment building or a home that has a HERS index of 45 or lower.

Robb: (10:58)
Is that a hard line or is that like an approximate line?

Paula: (11:02)
I’m pretty sure that’s a hard line for, at least in our zones that we work in. I’m not sure if it changes in zones one and two.

Robb: (11:10)
So kind of a practical line, you haven’t seen it really work… All the zero energy ready homes have had 45 or less or it’s like you just have to get 45?

Paula: (11:20)
in order to answer that question you’re asking me at point blank because it also goes with some of the state programs. So NYSERDA has a hard line for sure. And then Connecticut does as well for the tiers that in qualifying. And if you qualify for those tiers, you also have to be zero energy ready. So anyway, it gets, you know, it gets kind of an alphabet soup of confusing. But yes, there’s the doe zero energy ready homes, which can apply to anything that can be energy star labeled. So it has to be energy star labeled, it has to meet indoor air plus requirements and it has to meet a pretty stringent domestic hot water delivery requirement, which is a bit tricky for multifamily. So that’s what a ZERH is

Robb: (12:03)
and indoor airplus is an EPA air quality certification?

Paula: (12:07)
It is, it’s a companion certification to the energy star program. And then there’s the living building challenge. There’s an energy peddle in the living building challenge. There’s also a separate pathway for zero energy certification in the living building challenge. And we’ve had one project achieve that. A single family. And that program can also apply to any building type, commercial, residential. It’s open, the requirements are very simple. You’d have to demonstrate zero energy. It’s measured

Robb: (12:43)
So larger buildings, Paula, either of you, have you worked with multifamily buildings that have gotten a zero energy score?

Karla: (12:54)
zero energy larger buildings, not on the commercial side, on the multifamily side. So the push with the multifamily side has been, everything that pushes this really, are incentive programs and financing- either requirements or incentives through financing.

Robb: (13:11)
So in your experience, people aren’t just trying to get to zero, they’re not hordes of people trying to get to zero Energy

Karla: (13:20)
There aren’t hoards in general. And there’s certainly not in the multifamily sector. It is pushed for the affordable multifamily developers by their financing. And the requirements that come in the state of Connecticut and Pennsylvania specifically have enhanced the application process. If you do passive house, you get more points and it, since it’s such a competitive process for financing, those points become very important. So that’s where we’ve seen an uptick in passive house, which is our great pathway to zero energy building.

Paula: (13:53)
Yeah. The problem though was getting zero energy on multifamily buildings, anywhere from like three to four stories and above, is just that you have a much larger building, volume to available rooftop ratio. And the ability to offset all of your energies within that limited area,, it’s just a matter of numbers. You just don’t have the amount of area that you would need, which is why you would, if you were interested in a zero energy building, you start thinking about buying a green energy from a portfolio, from a community distributed energy resource.

Robb: (14:26)
Okay. I worked on one, I had a very small role in one zero energy multifamily project up near Albany. And we just did some consulting on the HVC and the units. He wanted to get away with very, very simple heating and cooling systems. But I think it was three or four stories

Paula: (14:48)
yes. that’s about the limiting range. Three, four stories.

Robb: (14:52)
But I think the PV was like covered parking, Pv covered parking so that, you know, it’s not a building, it’s kind of the site

Paula: (14:58)
surprised that we don’t see that more often. The covered parking PV over covered parking, particularly in the more suburban areas, maybe it’s the cost of the additional structure that you would have to install, but that would be a great place to put Pv for our multifamily buildings. Three to four stories or other otherwise garden style apartments. But it isn’t often seen.

Karla: (15:21)
I think that it’s not that it’s not accepted, but it’s not something that we see in the northeast. I see it a lot more down south. I’ve seen covered parking in Florida quite a bit. And we have one project in north Massachusetts. Is that where Amhurst and those schools are? They were looking so hard for places to put the PV because they are targeting zero energy for a dormitory. And so they’re lifting up above HVAC equipment on the roof, on, you know, pedestals for the PV as well as on the car ports. So, you know, when you think outside the box, there’s places for it to go. But that’s a pretty rural area up there. And you have to have the space for it. It’s not going to work in Manhattan. It’s not going to even work in Cambridge. We have another project in Cambridge with a university and when they came when they came to us, one of the first goals was we want to be zero energy – We want this seven story dorm to be zero energy. And quickly found that as hard as we were working with the envelope and the model which Paula is working on, they weren’t going to reach zero energy

Robb: (16:34)
not within the building footprint. They’d have to look beyond.

Karla: (16:39)
Well this dorm also has a cafeteria and some other amenities spaces. And so the usage is pretty high. \

Robb: (16:46)
So, Paula, when you get into bigger multifamily buildings, how does the modeling change? How do the programs change?

Paula: (16:52)
In terms of zero energy, similar to what Carla was saying, there’s really only the international living futures pedal certification for zero energy buildings. There’s a voluntary self-reporting that you can report to the National Building Institute, NBI, to claim that you are zero energy and that can be either modeled or actual. But that’s sort of, you know, you’re self-reporting, it’s on you to prove it. But there’s no other, you know, a particular program in the commercial market.

Robb: (17:33)
But modeling tools are different for commercial?

Paula: (17:37)
Yeah. Whereas Carla often uses HERS software primarily, we can use any number of ASHRAE approved or DOE 2 modeling programs. We primarily use EnQuest or open studio for that modeling. The concept for zero energy is the same though, whether you do a single family home or do a, you know, a school or an office building, you primarily just want to know what your loads are on the inside, balance out what the envelope needs to be, and provide a robust envelope, and then downsize your HVAC equipment and be thoughtful about your ventilation systems. And you at least can get to a low energy building if not a net zero if you don’t have the ability to install renewables onsite.

Robb: (18:31)
So if somebody comes to you in and says, one of these clients you’ve been talking about, “we want a zero energy building, we want a zero energy dorm” First step is?

Karla: (18:42)
tell them that the residents cannot bring in extra refrigerators or tell them that they’re limited to one laptop per student.

Robb: (18:50)
I guess this one, when I talked to Lois about passive houses, I mean it was like, it all depends on where in the design process they are. I mean, if they come to you very, very early, you didn’t really focus on the design. And the envelope, I assume you get the envelope as good as possible and modeling helps on that front.

Paula: (19:08)
You really have to model, you really have to model to understand the equipment that an owner anticipates in the building to understand the schedules of that building. You know, an apartment building is going to be different than a dorm cause obviously the density is different in terms of people and the kind of equipment families versus you know, Young 20 somethings in a dormitory, and the equipment that they can bring in versus a school which might only have like two computers per classroom or maybe a high school has computers and all their classrooms for every student. So the level of equipment can be anywhere across the board.

Karla: (19:46)
But ideally it is during schematic design, if not, definitely during design development and the mileage. I would say even design development is almost too late in some cases. Probably for the bigger buildings or the more complicated ones. And there should be continual iterations in the modeling as the designs are being developed. And there should be several plan reviews, usually a 50% design development, a hundred percent design development. Then again at 50 construction documents. And then after when they do that, that really horrible thing called value engineering, which isn’t really what it’s supposed to be. So after a VE set or a VE session, we get our eyes back on the plans again to make sure that none of the critical elements have been taken out and not properly replaced.

Robb: (20:35)
You mentioned the downsize of Hvhc and that’s one of this kind of concepts that I remember hearing talked about 20 years ago, but in practicality, rarely seen. But that’s I think coming into play. I mean if you go an awesome high R air tight envelope, there are opportunities to save some money on the HVAC

Karla: (20:59)
and the equipment is available in the sizes that are appropriate for the single family homes. Right. So when we get down from, we might’ve seen a house that had load calculation saying they needed five tons for the cooling and when properly calculated room by room low calculations, it’s comes down to two tons, and that piece of equipment and is available. So that’s great. But when it comes to the multifamily, where the loads are incredibly low and the high performing buildings like per apartment you make per apartment. And most cases, this is going to be a per apartment situation because the owners very seldom want to own the utilities. They might be willing to own, say natural gas bill for the domestic hot water for a central system, but they don’t want to own all of the tenants electric. So these are sub metered or individually metered, which means that every apartment has its own heating and cooling source. And so to get those really small, that’s when it gets tricky.

Robb: (21:59)
Gotcha. And on institutional buildings, commercial buildings, the loads are often like internal gains driven, not so much envelope driven.

Paula: (22:08)
Well, most of the time we find that in commercial buildings or even the more dense, higher, bigger and multifamily buildings, you don’t really need more than about an R20 opaque wall assembly. We always recommend better windows, always recommend triple pane. The windows are always the weakest link in your envelope assembly. But what is really driving the energy of the building are those internal loads, are all the equipment, all of the people, all of the ventilation within the building, that’s driving cooling and heating loads. The envelope, you know, doesn’t really keep too much out when you have to ventilate the building to the level that you want your building to be healthy, and you don’t want to fight that. But that was always a balance when we’re talking about commercial buildings, of how much ventilation you want to provide, how healthy do you want the interior to be versus the energy use of that building. Because More ventilation is going to be more energy.

Robb: (23:05)
Another reason why it’s easier for smaller buildings, I guess for single family, right? Because it’s really envelope driven rather than internal gas driven. So we mentioned schools, we mentioned colleges, but Paula there are a lot of interest in like public schools. Some school agents used to go this way. Is that, is that a whole different can of worms?

Paula: (23:23)
I think net zero certainly is possible and more so in public schools because it’s a, it’s very repeatable building typology. And I think that there’s a lot of studies that are out there typically. Typically, low rise urban schools are going to have a little bit more difficulty when they are approaching the four or five story limit, they have a smaller footprint that they can work in. But certainly in the burbs, where you have a two or three story school, you can absolutely get to net zero fairly early. But again, you do need to be cognizant of how you’re designing the building and what the loads are of the building, particularly kitchens. We had talked about kitchens previously, that one dorm kitchens can have a very high load that can make it difficult to meet your energy goals.

Karla: (24:10)
And remember we had the conversation about net energy or zero net energy or net zero energy. And so when you’re talking about the use of the building, and this will even come up with the dorm that we were just talking about, of whether or not it will be open in the summer for camps. And so that changes the dynamic because normally universities are closed for at least a couple of months. The dorms are being used for a couple of months and the same would hold true for a school, so easier in an annual period to show that you’re a zero energy.

Robb: (24:37)
Gotcha. You’re generating lots of electricity if you have PV when you’re not using much at all. Right?

Speaker 6: (24:44)
And that interests a introduces an interesting dynamic with the grid because if your school, which is producing the most amount of energy in the summertime is otherwise shut down your exporting most of that generated energy to the grid. And you know, is there a payback with your local utility for that export it energy? Is there a benefit to you or not and that that could play a role if it’s a financial decision

Karla: (25:12)
Well, we’ve seen it play a role too with nonprofits. So senior care facilities deciding not to go with PV because they’re already locked into a very low rate for what they pay for the electricity. So there’s no payback there to go.

Robb: (25:25)
Right. Gotcha. Yeah. And that’s getting back to something you mentioned earlier with the schools who have all this electricity, excess electricity and in the summertime, maybe that opens up opportunities for zero energy communities? Doing that?

Paula: (25:38)
Absolutely. I think We really need to start thinking beyond just the boundaries of our buildings and start thinking about communities and how either commercial buildings can use that exported electricity nearby and develop those relationships so that it’s not necessarily a burden to the grid because as we see in California and Hawaii, there’s a lot of renewable energy, it’s too much at the wrong time. Right, so in California, Hawaii, they really need to start talking about energy storage so that they can use that energy that they’re producing, just not at the time that is being produced. I think that’ll start being part of our conversation as we start talking about these community district energy systems so we can maintain that all within our communities.

Robb: (26:27)
So how about codes? I mean, I’ve heard lots of talk about California mostly, but also New York, Massachusetts, trying to move to zero energy codes. what does that mean? I’ve got to say I’ve heard a lot more talk substance on this topic.

Karla: (26:44)
Well, it’s a little easier to do out in California quite frankly because, you know, the installation goes a lot further. The PV goes a lot further. I mean, you’d need less installation and you need a little more PV and you can get to zero a lot faster in those zones because of the climate. And that’s not true everywhere in California for sure. But yeah, it’s definitely more of a challenge in zones four and five, which is Massachusetts and New York state, and Six of course. Yes. As you get up further north.

Robb: (27:20)
Yeah. All right. Yeah. The last I think I read, California was kind of backing off on the whole zero energy mandate and zero electricity as a first step. Is that to be determined? But are you involved in New York policy or any other policy on the east coast? I think, well, I think you were talking about schools

Paula: (27:43)
In New York City, they have developed the stretch code, which we anticipate. And then in the coming months, the stretch code I think is trying to get to be 20% better than current code. I’m a little bit skeptical on it because n knowing how energy modeling works, the regulated load, within our current code is already so low. And this percent better thing that we’ve done for so long is starting to be less effective. We need to start moving toward an absolute target of some sort. similar to how passive house has a target of 38, for example, for new construction, 38 SEUI, Source Energy use intensity. so it’s an energy per square foot on the source basis. So however much energy goes into generating the electricity from the power plant and that goes into that calculation. I don’t think that 38 is the right number for all building typologies. but I think we need to start talking about absolute numbers as opposed to this percent better cause this percent better starts to just be an obscure number that is very difficult to get to potentially. We’ve been finding that the percent better could be much more restrictive than a passive house, for example. So you can design a passive house building that doesn’t necessarily meet stretch code. That’s a problem.

Robb: (29:13)
That’s tough. All right. Yeah, so if we come back and five years and talk about this again, what will we be talking about?

Karla: (29:23)
We’ll probably be having a very similar conversation, however we’ll have many more examples. I do think we’re going to see the construction of some of these near zero, or you know, the multifamily is just not going to get to zero, but we’re, so, I don’t know what we’re going to call them, but we’re going to more construction. We’re going to see the fear factor go away.

Robb: (29:43)
The fear factor of, oh, zero energy is way too expensive. It’s too weird.

Karla: (29:49)
It not what we normally do, we can’t build like this. It’s outside of the way we do things kind of thing. We’re already seeing that change with sort of the second phase of developments that I’ve done, either passive house or close to zero or just getting to HERS index of 40 to 45 which is a big jump for some developers in multifamily that might be used to 20 points higher in a HERS index. So we’re moving in the right direction and I think well hopefully we’ll get the terminology down so that we’re not spending half of the podcast talking about the words without coming to any consensus.

Paula: (30:23)
I think terminology is hopefully what we’ll see a change in my industry, in the commercial world, we often say high performance buildings and I think we need to change that nomenclature to be low energy buildings or low carbon buildings. because a Maserati and Ferrari are high performance cars and yeah, they ride really well, but what’s their mpg? Right? we need the smart cars. We need, you know, the little electric cars or hybrid cars or something a little bit different. That’s going to be our solution.

Robb: (31:08)
Hopefully won’t get too many emails about that. People loving those smart cards. All right, so it’s not going to become standard practice, but people are going to be much more familiar with it and comfortable with it and we’ll have maybe metrics that are more meaningful. I think so. Nice. Cool. Anything else on the topic or we’ll talk about it again in five years. Maybe sooner than five years. Okay, great. Yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks rob.

Speaker 7: (31:46)
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 that 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.