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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.

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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

Moving beyond design—and toward performance

October 16, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Moving beyond design—and toward performance

Stone34 building in Fremont

McKinstry provided design-build mechanical and plumbing services for Stone34, a high-performance building in Seattle seen here. McKinstry has also measured and verified energy and water use ever since the building opened in August 2014. Stone34 is fully embracing performance-based outcome thinking, as project partners are still working to adhere to strict building performance guarantees. Photo by Doug Scott.

Today—more than ever before—building owners are pushing the construction industry to meet increasingly aggressive, socio-economic-driven energy performance targets.

Whether that push is motivated by a desire to save money or driven by more indirect benefits of lower energy use, owners are nonetheless demanding that building performance (in the form of energy efficiency) drive how their buildings are designed, built and operated.

Currently, the industry has two main strategies when it comes to constructing a building. The traditional approach is design-focused, siloed and—importantly—quite inadequate when it comes to guaranteeing building performance. As a result, the construction industry should be shifting and adapting to a new, performance-based approach across the board in order to meet the energy efficiency goals of building owners.

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Filed Under: Better Buildings, Big Ideas, Home Tagged With: Building Performance, Design, Energy Efficiency, Energy Savings, High-Performance Buildings, Performance-based outcomes

How creative engineering can solve your structural riddles

August 12, 2015 by Leave a Comment

How creative engineering can solve your structural riddles

engineering-image

Despite the popular perception of pocket-protector-clad engineers spending their days crunching numbers and running calculations, McKinstry believes that engineering is both a science and an art.

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Filed Under: Big Ideas Tagged With: Design, Engineering, Engineers, LEED

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