Page 205 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

PROGRAMMING 181

nudge it over that threshold. We found that on other projects as well. With a conven-
tional project budget, if you start out intending to build to LEED standards, Gold is
achievable. It seems that to get to Platinum you have to do something beyond a con-
ventional budget or beyond standard practice.

Also a principal at Lord Aeck Sargent, Larry Lord talks about how energy use is much
higher in laboratory buildings and how it’s possible to reduce that use dramatically with
some clever design thinking and a full integration of architecture, engineering, and new
technology:

Laboratory architecture and engineering is an interesting situation. It’s in the nature
of these buildings, (because of what’s going on inside them) that you have to bring in
air from the outside. In Arizona, in the summertime that air can be 110°F or more.
You have to cool it down it to 55 degrees (for distribution within the building). So you
have to put lots of chilled water through the coils get the air to cool down. Then you
distribute it. When we first started the design we had [the standard] 10 to 12 air
changes an hour, which means that 10 to 12 times every hour all of the air is new, so
you can imagine how much energy that takes. Over time that has been reduced, and
now we’re down to four to six air changes an hour. The biggest challenge from a pure
unadulterated energy usage standpoint is to try to reduce the number of air changes
so we don’t have to cool as much every time. Every laboratory building has the chal-
lenge of having a certain amount of air come in, stay there for 5 to 10 minutes (at the
standard design rate of 6 to 12 air changes per hour) and then go out through the
exhaust fans.

In terms of utilization, for example, the air is returned to the office side of the build-
ing. It’s just a conventional office building but the extra air goes into the atrium and
part of that goes into the labs. One strategy was, in essence, reusing the air that in an
office building you would normally just re-circulate. We re-circulate a part of it but
then it cascades down and is used as part of the air in the laboratories. We used all of
the precautions about avoiding off-gassing; we flushed out the building before it got
going, and so forth. You have to make sure that the beginning air quality is good.
In the labs, we know that the large number of air changes is going to give you very
high quality air because just by turning over so many times that will clean the air.
There’s a new technique that’s been placed in this building. In fact, we didn’t even get
a LEED point for it because it was installed later. It’s a new system from Aircuity.
Basically, it controls the air that’s coming in by controlling valves that in turn control
the number of air changes. Now that the system is installed, the number of air changes
has been reduced to four per hour. The reason that’s possible is that the system has,
what I call, “sniffers” that sense if there’s a problem. It can sense a number of gases
and other contaminants. If it detects a problem, it kicks the air handler back up to 10
to 12 air changes per hour.

Nicolow says that the challenge for the design team (in lab projects) is to get the
client’s environmental health and safety people involved early, if you plan on reduc-
ing the air exchange rates. So there’s another potential participant that needs to be a