SPARK

Discoveries, innovations, and insights that illuminate the future of the built environment

  • Home
  • Better Buildings
  • Big Ideas
  • B.L.U.E. Blog
  • Occupants & Operators
  • Technology
You are here: Home

Tyler Pritchard: Getting to know me & my journey to McKinstry’s B.L.U.E. Program

July 13, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Tyler Pritchard: Getting to know me & my journey to McKinstry’s B.L.U.E. Program

Currently, I am entering my fifth year at the Colorado School of Mines, pursuing a major in mechanical engineering with minors in energy and public affairs. Having been born in Edmonds, Wash., I was quite shaken by the move to Colorado. The air is so much thinner, the flora is so much drier, and the people are so much more…outdoorsy. Beer is a really big thing here. Oceans are not. Even the Coloradan flag is more cheerful than its Washingtonian peer. Regardless, I found my place in Colorado riding bikes, researching fuel cells, leading Mines Sustainability, and camping in the Rocky Mountains whenever possible.

Since that first jarring transition, I have gone on to bike across the Rockies twice, work as an intern for Senator Chris Hanson at the Colorado State Capitol, play piano on KUVO in Denver, and begin working on the techno-economic analysis of methane synthesis using proton-conducting electrolyzer cells. All the while, I also developed my appreciation for environmentally conscious and human-centered engineering.

During my first year  at Mines, I developed a fascination with the interactions between people, their built environment, and the natural environment. But, as a first-year student, I sat through classes where proficiency and cunning were proven through a talent with numbers and the ability to solve unfamiliar technical problems. There was rarely any consideration for how these numbers on the page translated to environmental or human health beyond. But, it was these  nagging questions — “Where does the exhaust go?,”  “What happens when nitrogen levels are this high?” —  that got me interested in human-centered design and energy engineering. And, this passion and curiosity are precisely what brought me to McKinstry.

My prior internship experiences, experimental fuel cell research and policy research at the Colorado State Capitol, have both given me a taste of academia and policy. But, prior to this summer, I still lacked any substantive experience in industry. Thus, I knew that I wanted to work in industry this summer. Furthermore, I aspire to become an elected official one day. And, during my time in politics, I noticed that one of the greatest shortcomings of our current elected officials is their lack of tangible knowledge regarding how sustainability is realized in a modern capitalist society. These officials do not understand what it takes to carry out a $4.5 billion lighting retrofit, nor do they understand what financing mechanisms tip solar from being economically favorable to being a waste of time and resources. Fearing I would also succumb to such blissful ignorance, I was further motivated to pursue an internship in industry.

Earlier this year, I had many ideas for who I’d like to work for this summer: Stantec, HDR, Siemens. But, in the back of my mind, I always knew that my dream would be to end up at McKinstry.  From McKinstry’s powerED campaign at Mines, I picked up on the dedication to upgrading facilities whilst also encouraging cultures to be more sustainable. Between powerED’s Shut the Sash campaign to its People.Power.Planet pledge page, I fell in love with McKinstry’s holistic approach to sustainability. And from there, I realized that McKinstry was exactly where I needed to be. No place combined my desire to experience industry and champion sustainability more wholly than McKinstry.


FacebookTwitterLinkedInGoogle GmailPocketGoogle+Share

Filed Under: B.L.U.E. Blog, Home Tagged With: B.L.U.E., B.L.U.E. Blog, Energy, Mountain Regions, powerED

Mission: Possible – Safe, efficient, just-in-time delivery

May 14, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Mission: Possible – Safe, efficient, just-in-time delivery

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

Working efficiently is nothing new at McKinstry. We have long believed that half the labor in a construction project is wasted and have been on a mission to drive efficiency into our work for years – everything from developing standard processes and adapting technology that streamlines our work to providing just-in-time delivery.

[Read more…]
FacebookTwitterLinkedInGoogle GmailPocketGoogle+Share

Filed Under: Big Ideas, Home, Technology

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.

[Read more…]
FacebookTwitterLinkedInGoogle GmailPocketGoogle+Share

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.

[Read more…]
FacebookTwitterLinkedInGoogle GmailPocketGoogle+Share

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.

[Read more…]
FacebookTwitterLinkedInGoogle GmailPocketGoogle+Share

Filed Under: Better Buildings, Home, Occupants & Operators

An Unprecedented Time for our Earth

April 22, 2020 by Leave a Comment

An Unprecedented Time for our Earth
Close-up of volunteers child and woman planting tree together

Ash Awad, P.E., is McKinstry’s Chief Market Officer.

Fifty years ago, on April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day was celebrated at rallies across the United States. Led by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson and Pacific Northwest icon Denis Hayes, and inspired by the protests of the 1960s, Earth Day began as a national teach-in on the environment and was intended to bring environmental causes into the national spotlight. What followed was a decade of wins for the environment – including the passage of the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Water Quality Improvement Act, and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency to safeguard our air, water and land. Today, more than 1 billion people are involved in Earth Day activities, making it the largest secular civic event in the world.

[Read more…]
FacebookTwitterLinkedInGoogle GmailPocketGoogle+Share

Filed Under: Big Ideas, Home

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.

[Read more…]
FacebookTwitterLinkedInGoogle GmailPocketGoogle+Share

Filed Under: Big Ideas, Home, Occupants & Operators

Mission: Possible—Lighting solutions, changing more than just bulbs

February 25, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Mission: Possible—Lighting solutions, changing more than just bulbs

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

From the moment you wake up to the moment your head hits the pillow, there’s a constant in almost everyone’s life—light. Whether it’s natural or artificial, in your home or your office, incandescent or LED, light is always in our lives.

In recent years, much of the conversation around energy efficiency and lighting had centered on switching from fluorescent or incandescent bulbs to LED lighting. Understandably so, considering that LED lighting is more efficient, versatile, and lasts longer.

Efficiency in lighting is about more than just changing bulbs, however. This is exactly where McKinstry’s Lighting Solutions team comes in.

[Read more…]
FacebookTwitterLinkedInGoogle GmailPocketGoogle+Share

Filed Under: Better Buildings, Big Ideas, Home Tagged With: Audit, Design, Energy Efficiency, LED, Lighting, Lighting Retrofits, Lighting Solutions, Mission:Possible, Procurement, Subcontractors, Supply Chain

Mission: Possible—The energy-saving potential of CHP systems

January 29, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Mission: Possible—The energy-saving potential of CHP systems

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

Since 2013, our Seattle energy team has worked with MultiCare (an integrated healthcare network made up of eight hospitals and numerous clinics across Washington) to deliver more than 30 projects and make every MultiCare building we touch more efficient. 

At Good Samaritan Hospital (located in Puyallup, Wash.), MultiCare and McKinstry recently implemented a combined heat and power (CHP) system. This innovative system allows the hospital to generate its own power on-site, which is drastically more reliable, cost efficient and energy efficient. 

At Good Samaritan, the new two-megawatt CHP system came online in late 2019 and was fully implemented in early 2020. The system will cut combined energy and maintenance costs by 25 percent, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent, as compared to just connecting to the standard power grid. 

[Read more…]
FacebookTwitterLinkedInGoogle GmailPocketGoogle+Share

Filed Under: Better Buildings, Big Ideas, Home Tagged With: CHP, Combined Heat and Power, Energy, Energy Efficiency, Healthcare, Hospitals, Mission:Possible, MultiCare, Puyallup, Washington

Revitalizing Kilgore College to extend its impact and legacy

December 6, 2019 by Leave a Comment

Revitalizing Kilgore College to extend its impact and legacy
Students returning to Kilgore College campus in the Fall of 2019. Photo courtesy of Kilgore College.

By Ryan Sheard, McKinstry Account Executive

Kilgore College is a Texas institution known across North America for excellence in academics, athletics and community service. It’s also home to a leading fire academy and the world-famous Rangerettes precision drill team that has entertained international audiences since 1940.

To prepare for its 85th anniversary in 2020, Kilgore College envisioned a comprehensive energy revitalization project to extend its impact and legacy. McKinstry worked hand-in-hand with Kilgore leadership to create learning environments as high performing as the Kilgore students themselves.

[Read more…]
FacebookTwitterLinkedInGoogle GmailPocketGoogle+Share

Filed Under: Home Tagged With: controls, Energy Efficiency, Energy Savings, Higher Ed, HVAC, Kilgore College, LED, Lighting, South Region, Texas

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • …
  • 15
  • Next Page »

Recent Posts

  • What Makes McKinstry Different? by Tyler Pritchard
  • What the McKinstry B.L.U.E program taught me: Zach Gerhardt
  • Intern Q&A: Lexie Bright
  • What it’s like to be a McKinstry Intern in Seattle: Michael Kinahan
  • How COVID-19 changed my Internship: Nolan Dahl

Tags

#2018WICWEEK B.L.U.E. B.L.U.E. Blog Building Technology Career Development Catalyst Building CES Colorado Construction Data Energy Energy Action Month Energy Efficiency Energy Savings Engineering Engineers Fire Protection Great Lakes Higher Ed HVAC Interns Internships K-12 LED Lighting Mechanical Midwest Mountain Regions Oregon Performance-based outcomes Portland powerED Safety Seattle Service Smart Buildings Spokane Sustainability Technical Services Technology The B.L.U.E. Experience Washington WIC Week Women in Construction Zero Energy

Recent Comments

  • James on A smart, comprehensive approach to a clean energy future
  • Eric on We’re ‘walking in’ for climate change
  • Bunji McLeod on Leaning and learning at McKinstry
  • Karl Darden on Leaning and learning at McKinstry
  • Frank Katkauskas on Aidan Korper: Getting to know me & my journey to McKinstry’s B.L.U.E. Program

sex

Archives

Copyright © 2021 · Genesis Sample Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in