Building A Green Bike (but its yellow!)

This is a reminder that Building A has a “green” bike available for all employees and contractors to use for free, thanks to the work of Kathy Sleavin and the Building A Green team (the bike is actually a very pretty yellow). The idea is to have a bike available to use for short errands – trips to the post office, shops, Rocky Mountain Research Station, for example – and avoid using your car. If your car is being repaired at a nearby shop you could take the bike with you to the repair shop and then ride the bike back to the office.

Sign out sheet and keys are at the front desk with Sharon. The bike is parked in the bike shed.

And we also need to thank the Ft. Collins Bicycle Co-op (http://fcbikecoop.org/) for donating the bike. The bike is a very interesting 3 speed commuter bike, somewhat similar to the Velib bicycles used in Paris. The Green Team encourages folks to use the bike, and use it often!

Building A reduces energy, saves dollars

Building A has had a 33% decline in gas usage and a 15% decline in electricity usage since 2008 for a savings of $116,000! I pulled off the data for the last 5 years of energy consumption for Building A on the NRRC campus and put it in an excel spreadsheet. The charts below summarize the usage. We think the revolving door is responsible for some of the decline but not all. We have reduced servers and there are government initiatives on energy conservation. For example all our printers were replaced last year with energy-efficient printers, and we installed light switches with motion detectors for our business rooms. I calculated an average total savings from 2008 to 2012 at $116,000.  Way to go Building A! 

 

 

Shut down, log off, hibernate, stand-by – which is it?

You always hear that you should shut down your computer each evening. In fact there is a little counter recently installed on your computer that requires you to shut it down every 7 days so updates can occur. But shutting down my computer is anathema to me. Turning it on each morning sometimes takes half an hour. I don’t know if it needs a morning cup of coffee or what, but it seems to take forever to get everything started up and logged on to the network.  It is really tempting just to leave it on every night so it is ready in the morning. But that wastes energy. Is there a compromise? What about those stand-by and hibernate options?

Yes, those are both valid options – they both take less power than keeping it on at night and you can be up and running in a couple of minutes. The basic differences are:

Standby = low power, fast to resume

Hibernate = no power, longer to resume (also safer for protecting data).

These two options are nicely summarized in http://lifehacker.com/311701/hibernate-vs-standby and also by the Forest Service on the sustainable operations website: http://www.fs.fed.us/sustainableoperations/documents/hibernate-computer.pdf. Also you now comply with two executive orders – one that President Bush signed (EO 13423) and expanded on by President Obama (EO 13514). Both of these executive orders encourage energy efficiency and conservation in federal agencies.

So to minimize power and maximize work time, I use hibernate mode most of the time and I also turn my monitor off every night. On Tuesday I only log off and not shut down or hibernate in order to allow virus scans to occur; then I do a total shut down later that week.

Hibernate lets me minimize energy consumption but I also can be up and running quickly in the morning.

So much more to recycling in Building A

Last month, I had a chance to talk with Judy Knaub, our Building A Support Services person, on recycling opportunities in Building A. There is so much more to recycling than our single stream buckets in our kitchen areas. Here are some other opportunities you should be aware of:

• batteries – tape ends and deposit down in mailroom. Aso there are boxes on some floors to collect batteries (Judy can tell you where)
• bins in business centers – recycle not only paper and magazines but also old books!
• your old office supplies (folders, notebooks, small items) – bring to the mailroom – there is place for folks to pick up used items and reuse them.
• Other things you may not be aware of – Judy recycles toner cartridges, wooden pallets, boxes, and office furniture
• And don’t forget our whole building composting! Please see some of the past blogs on composting (https://nrrcgreen.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/which-bin/)

We appreciate the work Judy does in recycling. If you have questions please e-mail Judy

Stunning results on energy conservation for the revolving door

Folks, the new revolving door has now been installed for a year, so it was an opportunity to see what effect the door had on our energy usage and bills. In the winter the building is heated with gas and the summer it is cooled using electricity. Of course electricity is used for many other things (servers, computers, lights, etc) but the summer did have our highest electric bills because of air conditioning demands. I chose to compare it with our bills and usage two years ago (recall that we went nearly a year using the side doors). Data is from CSU energy website. Here are the results  comparing 2011 with 2009:

• Electricity  – down 7.82 % (429,000 KWH saved for a savings of $19,827)
• Gas – down 13.73% (645 DTH (decatherms) for a savings of $4,384)

That’s a total over $24,000 saved in utility bills! The cost of the door was about $18,000 more than just repairing the old doors. Without getting into additional analysis (warm winters or cooler summers could have accounted for the savings but I doubt it; also there were other changes in electricity consumption e.g. installing energy star printers), it means the revolving door paid for itself in one year!

I also checked out our sister buildings B, D, and E to see the energy changes from two years ago. B posted significant increases in gas and electricity (40% an d 16%) and Building E, an all-electric LEEDs certified building, had a 9% increase. Only Building D (which has an active Green Team!) showed decreases in gas and electricity usage of 5% and 12%, respectively.

Way to go Building A! We had the greatest energy reduction of any building on our NRRC campus over the past two years. The revolving door appears to be a major factor in this reduction.

Daylighting – Making Bldg A a high performance building

On 12/8/2010 I attended a meeting on the High Performance Building Program given by two folks from the Governor’s Energy Office (Connor Merrigan and Paul Hutton).  They discussed the adoption of high performance building practices, and today’s topic was daylighting buildings. The twin aims of daylighting are to improve occupant comfort and reduce energy usage. They first discussed the importance of daylighting which includes better worker productivity, better test scores for students, and in one case Walmart found higher sales in parts of stores which had daylighting. Some folks rank daylighting just as important as nutrition.

Aspect is important in  daylighting. South facing, with direct sunlight, is simply too bright. The natural tendency is to close the blinds and turn on the lights (no energy savings there!). Rerouting direct sunlight to the ceiling and allowing it to be diffused over a larger area is one way to handle the problem of glare and bring daylighting advantages deeper into the building. We have an abundance of daylight in Colorado and only need about 1% or 2% of the foot candles we receive daily from the sun. One needs to get more daylight into the building’s core and keep it diffuse, minimize contrast, and avoid direct beam. Light shelves reflect the light to the ceiling  and help diffuse light and reflect it deeper into the building. Outside the building, sunshades and overhangs can shield areas where daylight may offer too much of a good thing.

For Building A, I think we need to have it assessed and several areas need to be addressed. One is the south-facing windows which could use sunshades or overhang. This could be very expensive. Another idea is the use of light louvres which can redirect the sunlight. For artifical lights in the building, I think we should have the capability to dim the lights and should look at daylight harvesters; there is no need to have all the lights on when we have so much daylight here. The Green Team will continue with this effort… who knows, maybe we can work in a daylighted environment, increase productivity, and save energy!

Bike to work on 12/15 – Enjoy breakfast on the Green Team!

Building A bikers – on Dec. 15th is the City of Ft. Collins’ Winter  Bike to Work day. Numerous businesses are hosting breakfasts for bikers that brave the cold and commute to work on their bikes. For details see the City’s web page at http://www.fcgov.com/common/pdfs/spotlight-pdf.php?id=29 Our Building A Green Team will also be cooking a breakfast for bikers from approximately 7:30am to 8:45am or so. Well, it won’t be a complete breakfast but it will be a hot breakfast burrito plus some hot cider. We will be outside the bike shed (if it is really cold we may inside the bike shed!). We average about 30 bicyclists a day in the summer and are down to 15… so those of you that traded your bike in for a your car, please try your commute one more time on your bike! Hope to see you on Wednesday.

Water Smart Landscaping

Last week I attended a meeting sponsored by the City of Ft. Collins on water smart landscaping. The first speaker was Dr. Jean Reeder and she spoke about the importance of knowing your soils and the relationship between moisture and clay, silt, and sand. The next speaker was Dr. David Whiting and he discussed hydrozoning (using similar plants with similar watering needs in the same zone or area). This concept could be used at this building. Also he discussed the amount of overwatering that occurs here in Ft. Collins – all in the interest of having a green lawn. The third speaker was Brent Jeffrey of AECOM and discussed some of the technologies available for smart watering (SWAT – Smart Water Application technologies). Next year there may be a business incentive to implement SWAT. Finally, I talked to Eric Olson of the City. He stopped by our building afterwards. He agreed to meet with us next spring and review where we could implement some water conservation techniques on the campus.

Revolving Door

Why revolving doors? It’s been an initiative with GSA to have older buildings like ours retrofitted with revolving doors, but why? Initially, revolving doors were invented for skyscrapers to prevent the chimney effect of the tall structure from sucking in air at high speed at the base and ejecting it through vents in the roof while the building is being heated, or sucking in air through the vents and ejecting it through the doors while being cooled, due to convection. The revolving door is always closed, so wind and drafts cannot blow into the building, also efficiently minimizing heating and air conditioning loads. So it is also very good for energy efficiency.
How big a difference can using a revolving door make? In 2006, a team of graduate students at MIT conducted an analysis of door use in one building on campus where they found just 23 percent of visitors used the revolving doors. According to their calculations, the swinging door allowed as much as eight times more air to pass through the building than the revolving door. Applying average Boston weather to their equations, the MIT team found that if everyone used the revolving doors, it would save more than 75,000 kilowatt-hours of energy—about 1.5 percent of the total required to heat and cool the building—and prevent 14.6 tons of carbon dioxide from being emitted. http://www.slate.com/id/2196201/#b

Revolving door

WE KNOW THERE ARE SOME WINNERS for predicting when the revolving door would be operational. The new revolving door was operational on Oct 18th… The good news is that we know that two folks voted for that week.  The bad news is that we do not know who they are. So, if you voted for that week please stop by my office for your prize (office 345 in suite 341) . The prize is a very rare limited edition coffee cup.