Good Idea Green Blog

"Using Green HVAC & Architecture To Make High Performance Buildings"

Groovin' to that green thang

Noel Susskind,

PE, LEED AP
Hamilton, Virginia

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Design is said to be a process of discovering. If thats true, then the trick is to discover everything that needs to be known in time to meet your deadline!

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The first role of the engineer is to apply science to the solution of human needs. As a young engineer, that was what attracted me to the profession.

I have been doing this for 27 years. I have seen it all but as project engineer I find it useful often focus on the how's and wherefores as much as the solution itself. As time passes, I see everyone around me dealing more and more with a flood of information. (More on information overload below).

I have become increasingly amazed with the way engineering teams collaborate, coordinate and otherwise exchange information with their clients and owners. It seems that designing a building can be more complicated than the building itself. It has ever been thus. Even I said so in this 2004 article "Information Age and Construction".

Architects, developers and owners, all related specialists, engage in an agonizing business of design and construction. It can be complicated in your specialty area. Most challenging is the constant need to synchronize your work with perhaps a dozen or more other engineers, architects and designers.

The exchange of design information should be accelerating smoothly, spurred by the ubiquity of the internet and high speed desktop computing. But in fact, the only thing smooth is the marketing. For me as HVAC engineer, IT has made in advancements in drawing capability, but it has not made our jobs as engineers any easier.

Whenever I see a project through anymore, I am always wondering how the project can be better organized or decomposed. I think of it as a puzzle to be simplified. I would break the project designers tasks down to:

• Collect information
• Collect more information
• Calculate and evaluate
• Design
• Vendor contact
• Evaluate
• Design some more
• Etc.
• Repeat

For HVAC, much of this is boils down to optimization of temperature, heat exchange and air exchange for maximum human comfort, energy efficiency, ease of maintenance, and initial cost. Simple, eh?

The rest of the HVAC engineers work:

• Making some order out of a chaos of mass amounts of building and equipment information
• Scheduling equipment information
• Creating drawings (3D preferably)
• Checking other disciplines for physical collisions

The mechanical contractors work:

• Pricing the work
• Coordinating the construction with other trades

Good Design

Better design leads to a holistic view of the built environment, both literally and figuratively.

• Total design documentation
• Design processes using Building Information Models (BIM)
• Best green practices.

There is a lot of change happening in this realm and opportunity.

Energy and building

Buildings consume 48% of all the energy that we use in the USA. A huge chunk of that is from fossil fuels, which (oil, gas, coal) are THE MAJOR COMPONENT of carbon emissions and related global warming. Carbon dioxide levels are climbing exponentially due to world-wide economic growth and industrialization. Global climate change is a dire threat, hence the need for sustainable and green practices. In my family we do our part by doing the sensible things to reduce our electric bill at home while driving the most fuel efficient cars to work.

How do we contribute to solving the problem of global warming caused by our civilization? First define the problem and see what you can do about it. If you are interested, read and talk to others about it and come back here to see what I have discovered as well. Check out the Good Idea Green Blog. A page on which I share my ideas, and I want to hear yours, too.