Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

I am actually enjoying being in the design office.  Not because of the hours of never ending spreadsheets which mushroom in to new ones every time you think one is done.  Not because the architect changes the size of the building every time I log on which really mucks up your heat and cooling load calculations and means I have to recalculate everything daily.  It is because sometimes I get the chance to be part of something unique and world famous.  

2 weeks ago I was in West Point as part of the mechanical consultancy team from Baltimore.  My line manager and I were invited to attend a Quality Assurance review for the new barrack block which New York District are taking the lead on.  West Point is enormous. Granted it runs 4 year college degree schemes and is not just a military finishing school. This place is built to last and actually has Ivy League Status (3rd in the ranking after Harvard and Princeton).  Started by the Corps of the Engineers in 1802 following the Revolutionary War with Britain, it has been a seat of learning since the Sausage Factory was merely a prep school and is expanding.  They need more accommodation

Some Renderings to show how the new barracks will look.

The new building philosophy is to make buildings as green as possible (ideally to 0% emissions) by reducing energy loss and increasing efficiency (hence lots of glass and big open spaces to circulate air more freely).  Sadly PV installations have been rejected (the generals over the river Hudson didn’t like the idea of seeing the stony fortress with sparkly roofs) and geothermal not practical (there is surprisingly little space for the extra outhouses and the place is built on sheer granite cliffs) so efficiency and use of natural cooling and heating are the key.  So how do I fit in?  The new buildings are all to have radiant flooring for cooling and heating which is very bold.  A system of pipes set in the concrete floor laid in a topping slab 8 inches thick through which hot or chilled water is pumped to provide the necessary comfort conditions.  So in heating season the floor provides radiant heat and in cooling the ceiling absorbs away the heat and cools the air. This system still requires a boiler and chiller but as the energy transfer is through water they are smaller and losses transferring the water to the rooms are considerably less. A Dedicated Outdoor Air Supply (DOAS) is necessary to prevent condensation build up but this is a fraction of the size of a standard ducted air system. The problem is the designer nominated has never designed this system before.  So we were there as technical experts to asses the the viability of the system because if it is successful this system will be used in the refurbishment of all the living accommodation.  Granted, everything my Line Manager and I knew was from 5 papers we read before arriving but it was enough.  The main concern was raised by the Head of Maintenance who, until now, has only ever managed buildings with big air handling units using fan coil units to heat and cool the rooms.  Big ducts and inefficient fans with big chillers and boilers make this an inefficient system but as the the building maint teams are full of guys nearing 60, Head of Maintenance is worried about training them up on a new system.  
The rest of the team was their to review the project management plan, the general management processes and the commissioning process (which New York District want to do themselves).  This internal review takes members of other districts to check the process, providing the sanity check that the whole project is going to work. This is an interesting concept because they have the manpower to achieve this, especially as New York is a tiny District with only a handful of projects going on. So after a foot of snow trapped us in the hotel we blitzed through the design and came up with the following recommendations for the radiant floor system:

The rooms should not have switches on the windows to turn off the system. The rooms could still be heated/cooled with out significant energy waste (the windows are the size of cat flaps anyway!) but a dew point sensor needs to be installed so that the system does cut if the room reaches dew point to prevent condensation from building up.

The current floor design calls for a layer of insulation between the topping slab and the structural slab. We think that putting the pipe system in the structural slab will make the cooling ability of the system more efficient because there is less thermal mass for the cooling effect to pass through. The current design anticipates the floor will cool the rising hot air when most cooling takes place in the ceiling. In the top floor an extra cooling slab is needed in the ceiling to ensure that these rooms benefit from the cooling.

The design needs to be reviewed by someone with technical experience – ASHRAE have been carrying out studies recently on the system to establish the best way of achieving the effect but there is not a lot of experience in this country in design.

The recommendations were accepted and we even managed to convince the Head of Maintenance to talk to Dartmouth College (New Hampshire) who installed this in 2006 where their head of maintenance was equally dubious but now loves it particularly because there are no fan coil unit filters to be changed from the top of a step ladder! Construction has started on site and they are having to blast away 70,000 tons of granite cliff to make room for it.

The site today. Note the big bundles used to tamp the explosions and the explosive drilling rig on the right.

Meanwhile back in Baltimore the Marina is still plodding along. Despite a few deadlines passing we are all getting extra time especially because the architect changes the design everyday. My solar wall has been canned because the architect doesn’t think the external wall will take the weight which he could have factored in if we had been involved for the start of the process and not at the 30% point. We have now sized the VRF system but still have to work through all the spaces that don’t need VRF, work out the exhaust rates, calculate make up air rates, add gas radiant heaters to work areas etc. My mentor is getting obsessive about some really trivial details which is also slowing me down. Currently he is planning to upgrade the current portable dust collector with an industrial grade wood mill sawdust extraction system for the saw bench because his only reference book on the subject is the Guide to Industrial Ventilation. He also asked the user if they would like the new ferrari system which they are now keen to install. In reality the current portable system more than meets the needs of the new users who only use the saw once a week max. We have had 2 snow days which is another reason we got more time particularly as New York had more snow days. This was even after the Project manager in New York called the head of design in Baltimore to question our ability to complete the job but then went straight to the head of engineering (the equivalent of a captain going to a full Col because Troopy might be late). Needless to say the PM is now back in his box.

I have been deemed ready for my next project in March which will now be a Visitors Control Center (think large guardroom with conference rooms) and if there is time another barrack block renovation in Aberdeen complete with “Collabratorium” meeting rooms. Lots to do.

And in other news:
Today here was a stabbing in the 7/11 over the road from the office which was a little out of the ordinary even in Baltimore just like the tornado that touched down 50 miles south of us. Puxsatawny Phil predicted 6 more weeks of winter on Feb 2nd and despite a 39% success rate the little bugger was right this time. The polar vortex is back next week. We managed to get a long weekend at Disneyworld Florida and stayed in the Shades of Green resort specifically reserved for serving and retired members of the US armed forces for next to nothing and a discounted park ticket. I am still the best Dad ever especially after selflessly taking my daughter to meet all the princesses. And the title of this piece is the theme tune to the new Lego movie which I took the kids to see and can’t get out of my head, but it seems quite apt.

As I sit in the office on a Saturday, I find the below very appropriate…