[Greenbuilding] What R-2000 is not (was re: please rant

Mon Apr 16 23:26:39 CDT 2007

Dear John,

  What I am talking about is how we are designing and building buildings.
  More specifically, I am talking about the idea of rejecting environmental phenomena by adding insulation to envelopes and seeking higher and higher levels of energy efficiency from doors, windows, and active energy components like lights, motors, compressors and ventilation systems.

  What I am concerned about is what the green building world is advocating; ie more of the same.

  Why I am concerned?  Because there is nothing that one who would follow this design strategy can do to achieve a sustainable level of performance from the building that results from this effort.

  Why am I bothering you with my concerns?  Because people tell me all the time what a smart guy you are and just how much you have helped move the green building world along the path that it is following.

  Why you should be concerned?  Because what you are advocating, be better than the past, is in fact repressing sustainability, generative and regenerative levels of performance from the marketplace.  Why go all the way when so much hoopla can be garnered from mediocrity.

  How do I know what I am saying is true?  Because I built the passive environmental engineering research facility and did the research & testing, actually over 6 years worth of it now.  There is nothing that you can do to an R2000 home to make it functionally sustainable, not because you are not a really smart guy at the top of the building energy design field, rather what you are trying to do is what is wrong (ie increase insulation and improve energy efficiency vs fashion physical/thermodynamic links).

  What should you do?  First tell Joe that he doesn't know crap about moisture, or better yet, tell him what he thinks he knows about moisture is wrong, fundamentally wrong.  Second, really listen to what I am telling you.  Your design strategy is where your problem is; what you are trying to do is what is wrong.  Third, forget cost for just one day and run your own cases, change all the lights, windows, doors, motors and controllers and then give your a/c system a 15,000 COP and apply 100% efficiency to all your devices and guess what.  If your not plugged in, you don't have a durable, safe, healthy and comfortable indoor living environment, irrespective of where you build it.  R2000 and R200,000,000 are functionally non-sustainable designs, because of what you are trying to do (ie reject the external environment)

  Is there an alternative?  As of last week, you would probably say no.  But the reason why I am letting people call me troll, is because I am trying to open your eyes to an alternative;  The Interactive Design Strategy.   

  Is it really better?  In most environmental zones, by an order of magnitude!  Same house, built with the same materials, side by side, one built to interact with its environment, the other design to reject it.  One is damm close to being functionally sustainable, totally passively (160w-hr/m^2-yr), the other destined to reproduce our non-sustainable past, forever.

  What does this mean in the big picture of things?  A case can be made that the rejection model home is single handily responsible for 50% of the 100 ppm of CO2 we have added to the atmosphere over the last 300 years or so (Paul Roberts, The End of Oil).  It most certainly will be responsible for 75% of the next 100 ppm we add, especially as solar/hybrid technology is added to transportation sector (100 mpg cars are being made today; http://www.calcars.org/).  ~70% of the profits from centralized power is made from 20% of the power they sell, specifically to the single family home. When externalized costs of big power are transferred back on to the cost of big power, the 15 cents we pay for 1 kW-hr at the home, actually costs us over $1.50 kW-hr (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=externalized+cost+of+big+power&fr=yfp-t-501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8). Green building has never produced a functionally sustainable dwelling, not one; after $30 billion in USGBC LEED projects, not
 one actually produces more energy than it consumes (http://www.mtpc.org/cleanenergy/energy/glossaryefficiency.htm/www.usgbc.org).  The economic return to the average American family for the sustainable home is over $30,000 (USD) in the first 7.3 years of home ownership, that is ten times the rate of return of Social Security, for exactly the same life cycle cost profile (www.TheRegenGroup.com).

  Why now?  Approaching Singularity (Danny Hillis), The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell), Moving Beyond Sustainability (Bill Reed).

  If you find that what I am saying is hard for you to understand, imagine just how crazy I must seem to someone who isn't a legitimate rocket scientist.  But I simply don't know what else to do.  I have tried preaching, building a better mouse trap, building a better better mouse trap, giving scientific presentations, writing papers, sharing my research results and even stooping to going to a green building conference to share with the herd of ill informed and dangerous.  Just about the only thing I have not done is challenge the leaders of the Green Building World to justify the crap they spew.  Which is the current mode of operation.

  I picked you because you really did help me understand what sustainability actually was a decade ago.  I can still vividly remember when I discovered how to passively dehumidify buildings and just how excited I was to tell you.  But I couldn't, because I did not actually know your way would not work. I though I was being kind by not sharing my fears.  But now I do know, and you should, no everyone who reads this post, should make somebody prove that I am a troll.  If that doesn't happen with all the great green building minds gathered here, then please revert back to my original post!

  Christophor Faust
  The Regen Group
  4150 St. Peters Street
  New Orleans, LA 70119
  christophor.faust at gmail.com   

John Straube <jfstraube at gmail.com> wrote:
  Hi Christophor

Joe would, with a few choice curse words, ask that you just tell us what you
are talking about.
We are still wondering what the approach is for drastically reducing R2000
house energy consumption "using special terms can you use well understood
words and describe what your proposed design or approach is? No acronyms and
only words with common definitions in the dictionary."

PS, A very small, very efficient 40W Grundfos circulator pump will consume
350 kWhr/yr.

Dr John Straube
Associate Professor
Dept of Civil Engineering & School of Architecture
University of Waterloo
www.johnstraube.ca
Waterloo, Ont., Canada
www.civil.uwaterloo.ca/beg

-----Original Message-----
From: greenbuilding-bounces at listserv.repp.org
[mailto:greenbuilding-bounces at listserv.repp.org] On Behalf Of Christophor
Faust
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2007 09:46
To: jfstraube at balancedsolutions.com;
greenbuilding-bounces at listserv.repp.org; David Delaney;
greenbuilding at listserv.repp.org; Nick Pine
Subject: Re: [Greenbuilding] What R-2000 is not (was re: please rant

Dear John,

A wise woman (Joe Lstiburek) once told me that sometimes providing too
much information is actually worse than not supplying enough. The latter
tends to repress/overwhelm the audiences thinking ability, while the former
tends to enhance it; especially if it is something they really want to know?
In order for this list serve to understand what I am trying to convey, they
had to do some brain storming and your original post opened the door to do
just that.

The second part is easy. As our group has a website and I had had them
post an invited presentation that we gave to the Joint Engineering Society
of LA (Designing the SOS for Homes) in January. For those that attending
GreenBuild in Denver, I also did a presentation there under the High
Performance Building Session (Shifting Paradigms: The Passive Thermal Engine
(PTE) Home), but they haven't published the results that any of us are aware
of. The JES-LA has codes and numbers aplenty, both interactive and
rejection model material (phrase's that can be found in the literature at
least 18 years ago and terms I got from a text that you John told me I
should read), as well as the unique challenges we are facing here in New
Orleans, ...and lots of definations.

But simply making people aware of it, wouldn't have the effect I was
seeking. I needed a few people who wanted to prove I was a troll! How is
it that Ted's post can be right, 36 kW-hr isn't enough power to run a
traditional vent fan or circ pump over a year's time-line, yet I am not a
troll? I felt I needed to challenge the list serves traditional rejection
model sensibilities to engage you in what the alternatives really were. (If
I was wrong I do appologize, ...its not my first mistake)

Maybe this way will work better at shifting paradigms? Let's see!

Christophor Faust

www.TheRegenGroup.com 

jfstraube at balancedsolutions.com wrote:
I for one would really like to know what you are talking about in some
more detail. 
Instead of using special terms can you use well understood words and
describe what your proposed design or approach is? No acronyms and only
words with common definitions in the dictionary. Perhaps I a slower than
most but it does seem others are having the same problem. 

Your definition of sustainable is quite reasonable if not all encompassing
so we are on the same page here. 

Sent from my BlackBerryR wireless device 

-----Original Message-----
From: Christophor Faust
Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 23:47:01
To:David Delaney 
, greenbuilding at listserv.repp.org, Nick Pine
Subject: Re: [Greenbuilding] What R-2000 is not (was re: please rant

Dear All,

While I have taken Eric, Shawna and Peter up on their offers/requests for
additional information directly, I did want to respond to our two budding
math geeks directly, and beg their forgiveness (W vs. W-hr) but hopefully
make a point at the same time. 

Lets say for a home to be considered "sustainable", it needs to durably
provide a safe, healthy and comfortable indoor living environment. (It may
also need to supply power to your TV, VCR & portable ARC welder too, but
that really isn't a function of the building's design, rather the "end use"
that the building is applied towards.) In order to meet the needs of a
sustainable level of performance, the building would need to heat, cool,
humidify, make hot water and ventilate an enclosed space as a minimum (for
the NOLA Standard of Sustainability we added refrigeration too, but that
isn't a universal requirement of passive survivability, thus not included
here). 

To accomplish these tasks, the designer can choose either to apply the
rejection model strategy of building energy design performance, (R2000 home
design), which results in something like:

Sustainable Deficit = 

A 2000 sq,ft, R2000 Home @ 20,000 W-hr/m^2 - yr = ~ 4,500 kW-hr/yr or about
$550/yr (US) to heat, cool, humidify, ventilate & make hot water; (a very
generous number in most climate zones). => 2.5 kW solar array (~ $18,750 US
installed)

Or she/he might choose an interactive model strategy like the one I
mentioned in my previous post:

A 2000 sq.ft. PTE Home @ 160 W-hr/m^2 - yr = ~ 36kW-hr/yr or about $5/yr
(US) to heat, cool, humidify, ventilate & make hot water; (again a very
generous number too).
=> 0.1 kW solar array (~ $1,000 US installed)

But the point is that there isn't anything that the R2000 home can
realistically do to change its number number (not R-1,000,000 envelope & EE
of 100%), whereas there is literally an infinite number of ways that the
interactive model can eliminate its "sustainable deficit". (Literally the
differential pressure that occurs across a dwelling could be used to as the
prime mover of the integrated system.)

Which was what I was attempting to convey with my original posts. Again, I
do apologize for leaving off the (hr) in my earlier posts. Does that still
make me a troll?

AOF

David Delaney 
wrote:
At 08:05 AM 14/04/2007, Nick Pine wrote:
>David writes:
>>
>> It's hard to make any sense of 160W/m^2-yr.
>
>How about 160 W/m^2?

Which is, as you well know, the same as my 160 W.yr/(m^2.yr). I was just
trying to preserve all of the symbols of the original. Also, when you write
it as 160 W.yr/(m^2.yr) it eliminates the need for a separate comment about
its being yearly average power. 

David 

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archived by REPP / CREST http://www.crest.org

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Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell?
 Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos.