Dr. J round idea!

 “Quick! Close the door, are you trying to heat the outside?” Living in a cold climate, I am sure we all have heard someone complain about the rush of cold air as you open the door. Now multiply that by 550 people walking in and out continuously to a single point of entry and you see in fact that heating the outside is exactly what we were trying to do using our precious fossil fuel. Unfortunately Building A doesn’t have the sun’s resources to produce heat, so replacing the lost heat in a green way wasn’t an alternative. In walks Dr. John Withrow, who saw beyond the box we reside in to come up with a solution that would benefit all concerned. Dr. John submitted an idea to the Green Team for a rotating door to replace a conventional door that had become dilapidated with use. In his research of circular doors, he discovered that fuel dollars in winter and the electric bill in summer would be reduced if the building could be equipped with an alternative round door entry. Below Dr. John Withrow is given a plaque “For Suggesting Building A’s Malfunctioning Main Sliding Doors be Replaced with Energy-Efficient Revolving Doors. Your Forward Environmental Thinking Resulted in a Significant and Permanent Reduction in Building A’s Energy Usage and Carbon Footprint.” Building “A” saw a 9% reduction in electricity consumption and a 16% reduction of natural gas in the first year. We applaud Dr. John for such a great idea.

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! 

 

 

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.

Revolving Door

Your Green Team has been pushing hard to have our broken front sliding doors replaced by an energy efficient revolving door. Guess when that will be?