SPARK

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

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

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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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Moving beyond design—and toward performance

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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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