The First Facility Management Blog

At ASHRAE’s 2010 Winter Conference held recently in Orlando, the BACnet committee approved final publication of eight addenda to the ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 135, A Data Communication Protocol for Building Automation and Control Networks. The addenda are expected to be available by the end of February.

The addenda include a specification for a standard way of representing data in XML that will give BACnet new capabilities for communications between a wide range of applications. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a popular technology in the data processing and communications worlds, due to its capability to model complex data and its flexibility to be transformed and extended.

“With this new IT-friendly way of representing building data, BACnet will open up new ways to communicate. XML can be used for exchanging files between systems, communicating with the Smart Grid, and expanding enterprise integration with richer Web services,” said Dave Robin, chair of the BACnet committee.

The XML syntax is intended to be the core data representation for a variety of uses:

• New Web services that are capable of efficient exchange of complex structured data.
• An electronic version of a BACnet PICS document, consumable by workstations and other tools, to describe the capabilities of a device.
• An “as built” description of a deployed device, distributed either as a separate file or as a BACnet File object resident in the device itself.
• Descriptions of proprietary objects, properties, and data types, which may be simple for basic data sharing purposes, or extremely rich, providing complete descriptions of the meaning and usage of the data in multiple human languages.
• An export/import format for tools and workstations to publish their knowledge of a complete system of devices and networks.
• An XML version of an EPICS, including the complete test database and other test-oriented data.

In addition to the new “computer language” of XML, another addendum has added an important new capability for human languages as well. When the Unicode character set was created many years ago, it was constructed to be universal set of characters to support most of the world’s languages together in one stream. However, its original 2-byte encoding caused trouble with many existing systems that were designed to process only the 1-byte characters common in Western languages. The “UTF-8″ encoding was created to solve this problem and quickly became a very popular method of conveying international text on the World Wide Web. BACnet has also embraced this standard and uses it in a way that fully takes advantage of its compatibility with the existing and ubiquitous ANSI/ASCII character set.

BACnet has also added support for more data types as well. A set of new “Value” objects rounds out BACnet’s ability to represent different data types in a uniform and standard way. Added to the original Analog, Binary and Multi State Value objects, are new Value objects for every primitive datatype that BACnet supports, including support for character strings and large numerics.

A new textbook designed to double as a reference manual that allows engineers to build on their knowledge of HVAC design procedures and methods has been published by ASHRAE. Principles of Heating, Ventilating and Air-Conditioning builds on much of the basic information in the 2009 ASHRAE Handbook—Fundamentals and contains the most current ASHRAE procedures and definitive, yet easy to understand, treatment of building HVAC systems, from basic principles through design and operation. Co-authors are Ronald Howell, Ph.D., P.E., William Coad and the late Harry Sauer Jr., Ph.D., P.E.

The book may be used for/by:

• Undergraduate engineering courses in the general field of HVAC;
• Similar courses at technical institutes;
• Continuing education and refresher short courses for engineers; and
• Adult education courses for non-engineers.

There are several significant changes in the new edition, including new values for climatic design information; new values of heating, wind and cooling, and dehumidifying design conditions; improved values of thermal conductivity and resistance for common building and insulating materials; and an extensively revised chapter on residential heating and cooling load calculations.

Additionally, the chapters on system design and equipment have been significantly revised to reflect recent changes and concepts in current heating and air-conditioning system practices.

Also available is Principles of HVAC Solutions Manual, which contains revised solutions to most of the problems in the Principles book.

The cost of Principles of HVAC is $89 ($76, ASHRAE members; $58, ASHRAE student members), while the cost of the solutions manual is $59 ($50, ASHRAE members).

To order, visit the ASHRAE.org Bookstore.

A new standard for the design of high performance green buildings is set to revolutionize the building industry. Published by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), in conjunction with the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES), and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), Standard 189.1, Standard for the Design of High-Performance, Green Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings, is the first code intended commercial green building standard in the United States.

The standard provides a green building foundation for those who strive to design, build, and operate green buildings. From site location to energy use to recycling, this standard will set the foundation for green buildings through its adoption into local codes. It covers key topic areas similar to green building rating systems: site sustainability, water use efficiency, energy efficiency, indoor environmental quality and the building’s impact on the atmosphere, materials and resources.

The energy efficiency goal of Standard 189.1 is to provide significant energy reduction over that in ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2007. It offers a broader scope than Standard 90.1 and is intended to provide minimum requirements for the siting, design, and construction of high performance, green buildings.

“The far reaching influence of the built environment necessitates action to reduce its impact,” Gordon Holness, ASHRAE president, said. “Provisions in the standard can reduce negative environmental impacts through high performance building design, construction, and operations practices. Ultimately, the aim is not just energy efficiency but a balance of environmental responsibility, resource efficiency, occupant comfort and well being, and community sensitivity, all while supporting the goal of sustainable development.”

Standard 189.1 has been written by experts representing all areas of the building industry, including engineers, lighting designers, sustainability experts, building owners, designers, architects, code and compliance officials, utilities, materials experts, and equipment manufacturers. The technical requirements in the standard were also supported by input from the building industry during the public review process.

For complete information on the standard, including a readable copy, visit this link.

The AEDG for Small Hospitals and Healthcare Facilities is the sixth in the 30% Advanced Energy Design Guide (AEDG) series designed to provide recommendations for achieving 30% energy savings over the minimum code requirements of ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-1999.

“The recommendations in the Small Hospitals and Healthcare Facilities Guide provide good design practices for integrating energy efficiency in a healthcare environment, while maintaining indoor air quality and required airflow and pressurization relationships,” Shanti Pless, chair of committee that wrote the guide, said.

The Guide focuses on small healthcare facilities up to 90,000 square feet in size, including acute care facilities, outpatient surgery centers, critical access hospitals, and inpatient community hospitals. These buildings have intensive heating and cooling systems, which the Guide covers extensively; additionally, other important energy saving measures such as daylighting are included.

“The energy efficiency recommendations in the Guide were developed based on design experiences from members of a project committee made up of healthcare facilities design professionals, combined with the insight gained from modeling the energy performance of these specific recommendations,” Pless said.

Some tips that the Guide offers include:

• Providing an unoccupied air flow and temperature setback for spaces that are not used 24 hours a day, such as surgery suites;
• Installing high efficiency condensing boilers with an outdoor air temperature reset schedule for all climate zones to address the high amounts of reheat energy used by such facilities to control humidity;
• Carefully laying out lighting design to meet recommended lighting power density by space type;
• Maximizing the use of daylighting and daylighting-responsive controls through both side lighting and top lighting strategies in all space types that do not have air change requirements;
• Installing an insulated thermal envelope, with additional recommendations to address air barriers and continuous insulation strategies.

The recommendations allow contractors, consulting engineers, architects, and designers to achieve advanced levels of energy savings easily without having to resort to detailed calculations or analyses.

Also, case studies provide examples of advanced hospital and healthcare facility designs that demonstrate the flexibility offered in achieving advanced energy savings such as the 30% goal of the Guide.

The AEDG series has been developed in collaboration with these partnering organizations: ASHRAE, the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES), the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Since the Guides first began to be offered in early 2008, more than 200,000 have been downloaded. Other books in the series deal with small office and retail buildings, K-12 school buildings, highway lodging and small warehouse and self storage buildings.

For a free copy of the latest AEDG, send an e-mail to tfm@groupc.com with the words “AEDG Healthcare” in the subject line. For other versions of these guides, visit www.ashrae.org/freeaedg.

Aimed at reducing energy use in facilities, the Building Energy Quotient Program (Building EQ) has been launched by ASHRAE along with building owners and designers, real estate developers, and government agencies. The program is designed to provide information on a facility’s energy use and to encourage finding ways to cut energy use and costs. With metrics for measuring both the energy the building is designed to use and the energy actually being consumed, the program aims to close the gaps between intention and operation.

Building EQ will include both “As Designed” (asset) and “In Operation” (as operated) ratings for all building types, except residential. It also will provide a detailed certificate with data on actual energy use, energy demand profiles, indoor air quality, and other information that will enable facility professionals to evaluate and reduce energy use. The program is administered by ASHRAE.

The Building EQ indicates how much energy is used per square foot. On the sample label below, the letter rating indicates how this building compares to a typical building and how close the building is to its technical potential.

“Information on a building energy’s use is the critical first step in making the necessary changes and choices to reduce energy use and costs,” said Gordon Holness, ASHRAE president. “The Building EQ program provides an easily understood scale to convey a building’s energy use in comparison to similar buildings, occupancy types and climate zone, while also providing building owners with building-specific information that can be used to improve building energy performance.”

Holness noted that building energy use disclosure is already mandatory in California; Washington, DC; Austin, TX; Washington State; the European Union; and Australia.

Those participating in the pilot program include:

• The Durst Organization, the owner, manager and builder of 9 million square feet of mid-town Manhattan office and residential properties, will include 4 Times Square, 1155 Avenue of the Americas and  One Bryant Park in New York City in the pilot
• The U.S. General Services Administration, the primary agency responsible for the acquisition and management of federal buildings owns or leases 8,600 properties and maintains an inventory of more than 354 million square feet of workspace for 1.1 million federal employees
• BNIM Architects, a leader of a new generation of design firms headquartered in Kansas City, MO, will include The Omega Center for Sustainable Living in Rhinebeck, NY; the Internal Revenue Service, Kansas City Campus, Kansas City, MO (see TFM’s February 2009 coverage of this facility); and the Fayez S. Sarofin Research Building, home of the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases, the University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston, in the pilot
• Hines, a privately owned real estate firm involved in real estate investment, development and property management worldwide headquartered in London and Houston, TX, will place high profile properties from five major U.S. market in the pilot
• The Detroit-Wayne Joint Building Authority will include the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center, which is home of six branches of city and county government including Circuit and Probate Courts, City and County Clerks and the Executive and Legislative branches of the City of Detroit, in the pilot
• The Michigan Department of Management and Budget, which acquires and manages properties for many of the state’s agencies.

Through the pilot program, the Building EQ program will allow fine tuning and final development of the program. In parallel with this effort, ASHRAE has developed a certification program for building energy modelers. Following completion of the pilot program in mid-June, the program is expected to be fully functional by the end of 2010.

Under the program, new buildings will be eligible to receive an” As Designed”, or asset, rating, which provides an assessment of the building based on the components specified in the design and is based on the results of building energy modeling and simulation. An “In Operation” rating will be available once the building has at least one year of data on the actual energy use and is based on a combination of the structure of the building and how it is operated. Existing buildings would be eligible to receive both an “As Designed” and “In Operation” rating.

“With procedures for both an ‘As Designed’ and ‘In Operation’ rating, building owners can make side by side comparisons that could further reconcile differences between designed and measured energy use on an ongoing basis,” Holness said.

Requirements to “lighten up” energy use and costs through fenestration, parking lot lighting, and other proposed measures are being recommended for Standard 90.1. ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2007, Energy Standard for Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings, provides minimum requirements for the energy efficient design of buildings except low-rise residential buildings. Currently, 15 proposed addenda to the standard are open for public review.

“As the industry continues to call for buildings and systems that use less energy, the Standard 90.1 committee is striving to find ways to reduce energy uses and costs,” Mick Schwedler, chair of the Standard 90.1 committee, said. “The proposed changes not only reduce energy use but move the standard closer to the workplan goal of a 2010 standard with 30 percent energy cost savings compared to the 2004 standards.”

Among the proposed addenda out for public comment is addendum cd, which would require active exterior control rather than just require the control capability; add bi-level control for general all night applications (such as parking lots to reduce lighting when not needed); and add control for façade and landscaping lighting not needed after midnight.

Eric Richman, chair of the standard’s lighting subcommittee, noted that studies from the California Lighting Technology Center at the University of California at Davis found that control strategies reduce lighting energy use by significant amounts during night time hours. A study by Polytechnic State University showed that parking lot lighting operates in a low mode 68% of the time.

Additional information from a study by Navigant Consulting shows that parking lots account for 22 Twh out of a total 57 Twh used for outdoor lighting annually nationwide. While this estimate includes all lit parking areas, the potential for energy savings in parking areas that are directly associated with specific building projects are significant and should be supported by the standard.

A second public review of proposed addendum, bn, would reduce solar loads by orienting the fenestration in more appropriate directions. Changed in response to comments during the first public review, this approach gives flexibility to building design teams to work with siting and fenestration and orientation as well as fenestration area to comply with the requirement.

Proposed addendum bb updates building envelope requirements for opaque elements, such as walls and rooms, and fenestration (windows and skylights). A number of changes were made in response to public comments during the first public review.

The proposed addenda to ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1 are available for comment only during their public review period. To read the addenda or to comment, visit this link.

ASHRAE has always prided itself on providing the gold standard in research, standards writing, publishing, and continuing education. However, when it came to energy efficiency and sustainability, gold just wasn’t good enough. That’s why the ASHRAE Headquarters has gone a step further and has been awarded a LEED Platinum Certification in the New Construction 2.2 rating system.

The Society’s office building in Atlanta, GA, which underwent a major renovation in 2008, is one of only six buildings in the state of Georgia to receive a LEED Platinum rating, the highest certification the program offers. LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a program of the United States Green Building Council (USGBC), a non-profit which seeks to promote green building practices.

“While our first objective was to provide a healthy, comfortable, and productive environment for our staff, we also wanted to set an example of what can be done to renovate existing buildings,” ASHRAE President Gordon Holness said. “Given that 75% to 80% of all existing buildings will still be around in 2030, our greatest opportunity for a sustainable future is through the upgrade and retrofit of these buildings. It is extremely gratifying to achieve the USGBC’s highest rating and confirm ASHRAE’s leadership and commitment to supporting a sustainable built environment.”

LEED takes into account five key measurements when evaluating new construction: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor environmental quality. Bonus points may be obtained through innovation in design and regional priority.

In order to qualify for the highly sought-after Platinum certification, ASHRAE took into consideration a number of concerns such as energy use, heat island reduction, water efficient landscaping, material reuse and water use reduction, to name just few.

ASHRAE addressed these issues, among others, by installing a cool, white reflective roof membrane to minimize heat island effects; updating the landscaping and eliminating the need for landscaping irrigation; retaining more than 75% of the existing building structure as part of this renovation; and reducing its estimated overall annual water consumption per year by almost 50% by using low-flow fixtures throughout building. Additionally, the ASHRAE headquarters received bonus points for innovation and design.

As a leader in energy efficient technology, ASHRAE viewed its headquarters renovation as the perfect way to “walk the talk.” The 34,500 square foot office building, built originally in 1965, now acts as a showcase of energy efficiency and sustainability through its living lab—which provides recourses on building, system and equipment performance—and learning center.

The LEED Platinum Certification acts as third-party verification of ASHRAE’s efforts to create an environmentally friendly, energy-efficient, sustainable workplace.

A newly released guide from ASHRAE on building information models and building information modeling (BIM) serves as a resource for professionals considering BIM tools and applications for their businesses.

According to An Introduction to Building Information Modeling, BIM is “a digital representation of the physical and the functional characteristics of a facility.” Unlike 2-D or 3-D CAD, BIM software uses intelligent objects to create models.

The benefits of using BIM applications are numerous, including enhanced interoperability which will improve integrated building design and integrated project delivery, according to Dave Conover, a member of the BIM Steering Committee who wrote the guide. Most important, however, is BIM’s ability “to create an accurate model that is useful throughout the entire life of the building, from initial design through occupancy and operation.”

Conover feels that that in addition to the actual benefits of the BIM process, the guide itself offers advantages in that it gives those unfamiliar with BIM “a fast and high level introduction.”

He went on to explain that even those already familiar with BIM could benefit from downloading the guide: “It provides some broad level insight into how BIM will affect the building industry in general.”

In addition to BIM’s advantages and tips for getting started with the application, the guide also includes a list of helpful software so that engineers might choose the best program for their company.

An Introduction to Building Information Modeling is available as a free download from this link: bim_guide.

While particle and gaseous contamination resulting from dust and dirt can lead to unexpected shutdowns of critical IT equipment, the connection between contamination and hardware failures is often overlooked. A new book from ASHRAE provides basic information essential to the control and prevention of particulate and gaseous contamination in datacom facilities. Particulate and Gaseous Contamination in Datacom Environments identifies datacom equipment susceptibility and operational impact, strategies for prevention and control, as well as contamination testing and analysis.

“Any installation planning checklist for datacom environments typically includes power, cooling, and structural criteria,” said the author Joe Prisco, a member of ASHRAE’s technical committee on mission control facilities, technology spaces, and electronic equipment.  “Contamination criteria can now be added. The guidance in this book is crucial for maintaining a high level of IT equipment dependability and availability.”

Prisco noted that as IT equipment shrinks in size, resulting in smaller components and less physical space between them, the risk of contamination grows.

The book is part of the ASHRAE Datacom Series, developed to provide a more comprehensive treatment of datacom cooling and related subjects. The cost of Particulate and Gaseous Contamination in Datacom Environments is $54 (ASHRAE members, $46). It is available from the ASHRAE bookstore.

The need to improve the energy efficiency of existing buildings was highlighted at the ASHRAE 2009 Annual Conference held in Louisville. At the meeting, ASHRAE launched the prototype of its Building Energy Quotient building energy labeling program and introduced a year-long focus on existing buildings.

“In these economic times, dollars for new construction have dwindled,” said Gordon Holness, ASHRAE president. “Given that more people are renovating than building new, now is the perfect time to focus on reducing energy consumption in existing buildings to save money and reduce carbon emissions.

“The vast majority of buildings that will exist in the year 2030 exist today,” Holness said. “If we are to have a material impact on overall energy use, it is through renovation of existing building stock. While existing buildings present greater challenges, they offer us a greater opportunity to impact our overall national energy demand, reduce our dependence upon imported oil and gas and minimize our carbon footprint.”

The Society launched its Building Energy Quotient program, known as Building EQ, which will include both asset and operational ratings for all building types, except residential. ASHRAE is working with major real estate developers to implement the label prototype this fall with a widespread launch of the full program in 2010.