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Return to Work with Confidence – A Water Systems Perspective

May 12, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Return to Work with Confidence – A Water Systems Perspective
Empty corporate office

By Larry Mayotte, Operations Manager, Service

Building owners and facility managers are diligently preparing their plans to reoccupy buildings that have been under-utilized or sat empty for weeks or months. In their efforts to ensure occupants can safely return to the workplace, they are tuning up their heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems and implementing physical distancing and other protocol to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

One area that is often overlooked but is just as critical to safely reopening a building, is a building’s water system (potable, non-potable, cooling towers, evaporative HVAC equipment). Most building owners and operators don’t typically have to deal with health risks from these systems. But, in buildings that have low or no use for extended periods of time, there is significant risk of bacteria such as legionella building up. This build-up puts occupants at risk of exposure to Pontiac Fever, an acute nonfatal respiratory disease, or Legionnaires Disease, a type of pneumonia caused by inhaling bacteria from water and the deadliest waterborne disease in the United States.

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Filed Under: Home, Occupants & Operators

Return to Work with Confidence – An HVAC Perspective

May 7, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Return to Work with Confidence – An HVAC Perspective
Woman unlocks office door with a key.

By Michael Frank, Vice President, Engineering and Design

Many people are wondering what it will look like when we all return to work in buildings that have been mostly vacant for weeks, and in some cases months. There are a lot of conversations happening and articles being written about occupant density, and I imagine seating layouts will never look quite the same.

How about the HVAC and plumbing systems that have been put into a holiday schedule or turned off for this same time period? How do we get them ready so our employees can return with confidence? Once they are ready, and employees start returning in a staged occupancy, how should we operate them and what should we be thinking about? There is a lot of research and reporting being done on the role of an HVAC system in keeping us safe, or potentially spreading the novel coronavirus.

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Filed Under: Home, Occupants & Operators

Negative airflow is a positive at this Northwest hospital

April 29, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Negative airflow is a positive at this Northwest hospital
UW Medicine Northwest Hospital

By Geremy Wolff, Regional Director – Technical Services

At McKinstry, our mission is to make every building we touch more efficient. “Mission: Possible” is our series featuring people and projects around the country that demonstrate our mission in action.

Sometimes efficiency looks different from how we typically think of it. When McKinstry announced our mission to make every building we touch more efficient, we didn’t know we would be soon facing a pandemic. In one Seattle hospital, efficiency has come to mean re-configuring the HVAC equipment to minimize the spread of infection and keep the frontline healthcare workers and patients safe.

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Filed Under: Better Buildings, Home, Occupants & Operators

Update: HVAC Best Practices to Reduce Coronavirus Spread

April 2, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Update: HVAC Best Practices to Reduce Coronavirus Spread

Adam Gloss revisits his post from March 31 with current information on best practices for reducing the spread of coronavirus via HVAC systems.  

With developments around the coronavirus moving quickly, there is a lot of conflicting information about whether the virus is being found in the air (becoming aerosolized). According to the latest information from the World Health Organization, while this is possible in some rare circumstances, the primary means of transmission remains through droplet and contact transmission, not airborne transmission.

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Filed Under: Big Ideas, Home, Occupants & Operators

How energy efficiency is powering the new University of Utah Health Science Campus

October 17, 2019 by Leave a Comment

How energy efficiency is powering the new University of Utah Health Science Campus

By Erick Allen and DJ Hubler

The University of Utah (U of U) Health Science Campus houses nearly 4 million square feet of critical patient care, laboratory and educational space. In 2017, the U of U broke ground on several new cutting-edge buildings—totaling nearly 800,000 square feet—transforming the campus. The university realized that their existing chilled water plant didn’t have the capacity to meet the loads of these new buildings scheduled to come online.

The U of U Planning, Design and Construction (PDC) team studied how best to meet this new cooling load—either by adding new chillers at a cost of nearly $40 million, or by significantly decreasing the cooling load in existing buildings. Reducing the load in the existing buildings could be accomplished for less than $25 million and would also result in ongoing energy savings. The choice was clear, and the university set out to find a partner to help them design, build and execute these energy-saving measures.

The PDC team chose McKinstry as its partner, with a dual goal of reducing the load on the chilled water plant by at least 2,000 tons and saving enough energy in the process to pay back the capital used to fund the project within 10 years.

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Filed Under: Better Buildings, Big Ideas, Home, Occupants & Operators Tagged With: Audit, Design-Build, Energy Efficiency, Higher Ed, Medical, Retrofits, University of Utah

Connecting sustainable spaces with healthy places

August 28, 2019 by Leave a Comment

Connecting sustainable spaces with healthy places

Did you know that the average American spends 85 percent of their time within a building?

Sarah Spencer-Workman, a Technical Services Senior Manager based in McKinstry’s Golden, Colo. office.

As a result, building industry professionals and owners have started to realize that the built environment has direct and indirect effects on human wellness and productivity—even if occupants are often unaware.

Specifically, industry health and building experts from leading institutions are making it a priority to investigate the link between indoor environmental quality, cognitive function and decision-making performance.

One particular study, known as COGfx, placed 24 participants over the course of six full work days in an environmentally-controlled office space of fluctuating ventilation conditions—ranging from conventional office buildings to green buildings and green buildings with enhanced ventilation. Subsequently, the study yielded noteworthy results demonstrating:

  • 101 percent higher cognitive performance scores in green buildings with enhanced ventilation
  • An eight percent increase in employee decision-making performance equates to approximately $6,500 improved productivity each year
  • A productivity increase that was 150 times greater than the resulting energy costs

With higher employee satisfaction, a substantial increase in productivity and minimal cost to the employer, the COGfx study has provided peer-reviewed evidence for the connection between sustainable building and occupant health.

Further, in an Urban Land Institute survey, 92 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that health and wellness features in a real estate property can impact its market success and economic value.

Connecting studies to real-world results

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Filed Under: Better Buildings, Big Ideas, Home, Occupants & Operators Tagged With: City of Lakewood, COGfx, Colorado, Colorado School of Mines, Energy, Mountain Regions, Productivity, Studies, Sustainability

Facility improvements deliver big benefits for Larson Ice Center

July 22, 2019 by Leave a Comment

Facility improvements deliver big benefits for Larson Ice Center

There are more than 4,000 municipal and community ice arenas currently operating across the U.S. These ice arenas offer communities a healthy way to connect and stay active. Maintaining ice arenas facilities can be challenging and improving them can be costly. Additionally, the energy and operational costs needed to run ice arenas continues to increase year after year.

Ice arenas are complex facilities. To provide a quality ice surface, they must maintain proper ice temperature with appropriate amounts of humidity, all while maintaining a comfortable environment for the athletes, coaches, spectators, facility managers and the members of the community who attend events at the facility.

McKinstry partners with ice arenas and recreational facilities across the country to develop and implement solutions to address deferred maintenance items and make improvements to the facility with the goal of reducing energy and operational spend. We are passionate about the game and committed to finding ways to make hockey and other ice activities affordable for everyone.

McKinstry works hard to drive down ice arena operating costs. Our Midwest team, in particular, grew up on the ice as players, coaches and on-ice officials at the high school, collegiate and professional level. All of us have been hockey parents and one of our teammates is a current member of the off-ice officiating staff for the NHL. My colleague Susie MacMillan operated an ice arena before joining McKinstry. That passion for hockey and ice arenas is why the Brookings City Council in South Dakota trusted McKinstry to be their partner for the Larson Ice Center renovation project.

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Filed Under: Better Buildings, Big Ideas, Home, Occupants & Operators Tagged With: Brookings, Energy Efficiency, Hockey, Ice Arena, Ice Center, Midwest, Minnesota, Municipalities, NHL, South Dakota

Building a “happy place”

April 5, 2019 by Leave a Comment

Building a “happy place”

Take a moment to close your eyes and picture your “happy place.” Perhaps you’re floating in a lake or hiking through the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Let your imagination open your senses and become fully immersed in that setting. Now—open your eyes. Were you imagining yourself indoors or outside?

doyle_andie


Andie Doyle.

At a recent conference I attended, a panelist asked the audience this question. It was during a Smart Home lecture, and—even then—80 percent of the participants said their happy place was outside.

This highlights a major opportunity within the building industry: To make indoor spaces happier and more desirable. It’s vital for construction industry leaders to work alongside technology innovators and service providers to change the optics of how a person interacts with their surroundings.

As of now, there’s no single industry or company with the resources or motivation to create a seamlessly integrated and connected experience for people. Consider, for example, the following hypothetical living and working situation.

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Filed Under: Better Buildings, Big Ideas, Home, Occupants & Operators, Technology Tagged With: Building Systems, Drones, Energy Efficiency, Happy Places, Private Sector, Public Sector, Siloes, Smart Buildings, Technology, Zero Energy

Condition data can fix capital plans

February 25, 2019 by Leave a Comment

Condition data can fix capital plans

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Every facility management organization has horror stories of late-night repairs or equipment failures on the worst day of the year. Teams scramble to fix the problem and work overtime to get the building back up and running.

Nobody enjoys working reactively. But small teams, tight budgets, big workloads, daily issues and a growing backlog of deferred maintenance force most facility operations teams to prioritize emergencies over prevention. This resource-constrained world is the constant reality for facility management, and it’s unlikely anyone will start being asked to do less with more any time soon.

Organizations that efficiently use what they already have, value the time and expertise of their facility teams, and look around the corner can thrive in this world of scarcity. One common factor in their success? These best-in-class organizations rely on thoughtful capital plans to help them reduce the likelihood of unexpected failures – and they use facility condition assessment information to get them there.

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Filed Under: Better Buildings, Big Ideas, Home, Occupants & Operators, Technology Tagged With: Big Data, Data, Deferred Maintenance, Facility Condition Assessment, FCA, HVAC

Building a thriving planet in 2019…and beyond

February 7, 2019 by 1 Comment

Building a thriving planet in 2019…and beyond

dean2019kickoff_sparkimage

February is already upon us and McKinstry’s work on projects across the country is in full swing. I’m proud to say that our platform provides unique opportunities for us to explore, invent and create an ever more efficient built environment.

That efficiency takes many forms if you’re building a 40-story skyscraper, retrofitting an elementary school or servicing a boiler. But, the underlying need is always the same: Today’s built environment costs more than it should to build, operate and maintain.

There’s no shortage of strategies for making the built environment more efficient, and—when you consider that construction is one of the least productive sectors of the U.S. economy—there’s also no shortage of opportunity. So, what will this new paradigm of efficiency look like for McKinstry in 2019 and beyond?

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Filed Under: Better Buildings, Big Ideas, Home, Occupants & Operators, Technology Tagged With: 2019, AI, AR, Catalyst, Hub facility, Optio3, South Landing, Spokane, The Future, Visual Vocal, VR, Zero Energy

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