Welcome to the Limn


Join me as I brush up on my own green knowledge as well as rejuvenate my long lost love for sketching. A lot of the posts most likely will focus on sustainable building because, hey, I'm an architect, and that's my focus. But in this open-minded conquest to understand this vague term of righteousness, who knows what will be churned out.


A huge part of sustainability that actually makes it work is a little thing called education. As I educate myself on many of these issues, feel free to follow along, contribute, or present some other ideas worth exploring, delineating, diagraming, sketching.......

Monday, November 19, 2012

samples...samples...SAMPLES!

Ok, I got a bit sidetracked as I attempted to continue my wind energy research, so that topic will just have to wait. Instead, I came across this video:
which left me watching it more than once because of it's absurdity. It's hilarious because it's so ridiculous, and therefore, the video did it's job. It made me think.....
I can't wait for more of these to be posted.

And IN steps in the topic of 'what do do with all those product samples?' Most firms within the building industry have not-so-insignificant square footage dedicated to housing binder after binder, box after box of samples, that for the most part, take up energy consuming interior space, collect dust, and provide an organizational project for any summer intern. Yet the samples keep coming in, keep piling up, and then all of a sudden, your firm changes, perhaps has to downsize or simply update it's inventory, and where do all those precious materials go? Well, if you're someone like me, you snag a bunch of those carpet and tile samples to create your new area rug with the plan to hopefully use the tile for some cool backsplash or at least some coasters. But alas, even those usually gets the boot sooner or later, all to end up with the rest of the pre-determinedly doomed samples that have already hit the bin. It's a shame, really, because a lot of the materials that gets pitched are pretty cool stuff. Just what do you DO with them, though, after they've lived out it's useful life in the office? 

My past firm had recently gone through such a change, and I was there to witness the dumpster after dumpster of STUFF that just had to go. It was seriously jaw-dropping. BUT, when you loose office square footage, it's obviously going to be redistributed amongst money-making employees, not binders and drawers and cabinets and room after room of samples. You look at all the waste and think, can't any of this be recycled? Or Reused? Or up-cycled for that matter?
There actually was a group in town to help take such items and redistribute them to students, and I thought, now THAT is what I'm talking about. I would have loved to have some hands-on time with material samples in school, but no, you don't get to touch any of those until the 'real' world. Unfortunate, I know, when now you see that all this stuff is really getting thrown out! This group,  Save a Sample , does exactly that, and it seemed, at the time, like such a no-brainer. I'm not positive if it was the exact entity my firm had considered using (I'm guessing so because I wasn't able to round up any other group who does this), but in the end, we ended up not even contributing because of the amount of restrictions on type and amount of items you could donate. We just had TOO MUCH stuff that wasn't organized, and therefore, not deemed suitable for this. So this good idea backfired and into the dumpster it all went. All of it. Again, such a shame. I'm thinking, hmmm, if only there were more incentives or simply less restrictions on donating, then MAYBE, more firms would be on board? Who knows....


Now, not all hope is lost because often times, the samples are able to be recycled if you return them back to the companies from which they came. But what do you do when you don't have the time or money to call up all those reps to come pick up your 'garbage' all the time? First off, just stop collecting samples. OR take only what's needed if a rep comes by and shows the entire collection. OR just take more advantage of the internet and if you really need something, then call your rep. When he/she comes, be ready to give back some of your out-of-date stuff to be returned to the company. OR take these samples and do something amazing with them. I don't know how many compliments I've gotten on my mismatched area rug, and how many jaws drop when people hear this was all stuff heading for the can. Or for a bit more competitiveness, find a local contest such as Ample Sample to show off your design skills. Can't you totally see some of these things being sold for top dollar at some designer store? And it's made from FREE stuff. It can't get any better than that. This should really be a whole market in itself.

In the grand scheme of things, of all the waste that is generated from actually producing a building, from office paper to construction waste, is pitching a 'few' samples really a big deal? Project after project passes, this stuff builds up, gets stacked in random corners of the office, and then all of a sudden no one really knows what these materials were for. Totally not the idea of the materials library, eh? Samples are not even serving their original purpose, but are now just crowding the workplace, waiting for someone to get fed up with the mess and just throw it all away. If offices tend to focus so much on recycling and making those double-sided prints, then is it really such a far stretch to be concerned with all of this much more energy-intensive STUFF piling up around you? Maybe it's not such a stretch after all. Maybe it's time to implement a 'Sample Plan' into your recycling agenda.




















Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Lifting the Fog of Power vs. Energy

My curiosity on wind power has been sparked again, and I really wanted to understand what makes this idea so NON-cost-effective. Wind turbines are springing up more and more, yet you still hear the complaint that there's not quite the ROI as desired. Looking at some comparison charts of wind turbine sizes, I noticed (with actual conscious interest this time) that they were categorized in terms of kWs or MWs (and just to be super clear kW = 1000 watts and MW = 1 million watts). So, I asked myself, what do those numbers really mean? Is it saying it's producing a certain amount of power....or a certain amount of energy? And what is the difference between power and energy anyways? A shameful question I must admit for someone who's probably aced all the tests on the subject when the info was fresh in the brain. But like many others I've encountered, no matter how much we study that chapter on electricity, we leave with the same amount of fog we entered with. Well, let's try and lift that fog once and for all, so we stop doubting ourselves and sounding ignorant when really talking about energy. I originally set out to look deeper into this issue of size vs. cost. vs. energy output, but first I needed to step back, waaaaay back to understand the basics.  Back we go to high school physics.......

First off, let's define what each item actually is:

ENERGY: a measure of HOW MUCH fuel is contained within or used by something over a specific amount of time. (kWh, Joule, Calorie, BTU, Therms....)

POWER: the RATE at which energy is generated or used. (J/s, W, kW, MW.....)

Read them again. Notice the differences? Energy is like talking about miles while Power is like mph. Amount vs. rate. Got it?

But let's look a little closer into energy, then we'll tie that back into power. Now, energy, as you know, comes in many different forms, cannot be created or destroyed, but can be converted. So it's a bit misguiding to say you've 'used all the energy' when in fact, it's merely been converted into some other form that is no longer of use to you.

Below you will see a list of different kinds of energy and some examples of conversion:

Electrical
Mechanical
Chemical
Thermal
Radiant (electromagnetic Radiation)
Nuclear
Magnetic
Elastic
Sound
Light
Mass (E=MC2)

Thermal energy   --- into ---> Mechanical Energy --- via ---> Steam Turbine
Chemical energy   --- into ---> Thermal Energy --- via ---> Fire
Electric energy   --- into ---> Electromagnetic Radiation --- via ---> LED
Electromagnetic Radiation  --- into ---> Electrical Energy --- via ---> Solar Cell

Electricity is one of the major items we think about in terms of energy, but electricity is measured in volts. How then, does this translate into, let's say, an 800kW turbine? 

To do this, we first need to understand the components of electricity. Like water in a hose (the electrons in a wire) there is a pressure [volts (V)] pushing the water through which creates a current [amp (I)]. If you have something trying to slow down your flow of water, you then have a resistance [ohm (Ω or R)]  in the current. With these items and a little thing called Ohm's Law, you can now calculate a watt!

Think of electricity like water flowing through a hose.
The most basic formula being:
Power (Watts) = Voltage * Current
P = V * I

Remember, power is a RATE, and to measure the electrical power (P) of something the Watt (W) is used as a nice abbreviation for the RATE, J/s (joules/second) or (energy/time). But then you say, hey, how do you get J/s from the equation Volts * Amps? I'm not going to go into that here, just trust that it works that way (or see yourself how the conversion works). All you need to remember is that Volts * Amps = Watts, and that Watts is a RATE of energy usage.

You can use these triangles to help you remember what calculations give you certain variables. Simply cover one letter and the other two's position within the triangle will give you the calculation you need.

So back to our 800kW wind turbine. This number is telling us the rate at which electric power is being produced. NOT the amount of power, but the RATE (again, think of mph). If this is its rate at full speed, then at no speed, you now have a 0kW turbine (just like if your car stops, you are then going 0mph).
800kW               vs.               0kW
But we want to also know how much ENERGY is being produced from this. And this is where we introduce Mr. Power to Ms. Time. With these two together, we can create little energy babies.

Energy = Power (or Watts or J/s or RATE) x Hours (Time)
E = W * h............. = Wh
(first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Wh in the baby carriage....horrible, right? but doesn't 'Wh kinda look like the sound a baby makes? ' Waaaaaaahhhhh)

Therefore, we can say that for an 800kW turbine running for 2 hours, it can produce 1600 kWh of energy. And THIS, the kWh, is how utility companies charge you for electricity.... those sneaky guys.

For example, if you are running five 100W light bulbs in your home for 8 hours each and electricity is charged at $0.07 a kWh, then it will cost you....

5*100W = 500W = .5 kW
.5kW * 8 hours = 4.0 kWh
4.0 kWh * $0.07/kWh = $0.28

Ok, that was a lot of variables all at once, but hopefully the fog of energy vs. electricity vs. power vs. W and kWh and how you get charged on your electric bill has been lifted, and we can all move on to more exciting things...like perhaps my original ponder about the cost effectiveness of wind turbines in general or any other energy producing (or more correctly put, converting) apparatus. More on this to come.....










Friday, November 9, 2012

Water 'Pac Man'

Water is pretty much super awesome. On top of helping gobble up COin the atmosphere, it keeps us clean, provides us with food, sustains life, and allows our fave fishies to flourish for that date-night sushi night out. And we all have heard that rumor that fresh water is becoming scarce, yet why is this not more openly being discussed? Why was THIS not an issue in the debate next to clean coal and wind power? We all need water to survive just as much as we think we need natural gas, coal, solar power, you name it, so why are we not fighting to conserve it on a more national level? Now, being Friday, I'm going to save you from pages of scary statistics all pointing to a looming worldwide disaster and present you with some other items to ponder. Below you will find a great link to a study showing the overconsumption of renewable fresh water per country around the world. Are we thirsty or what?!

Water Depletion Chart by the SASI Group and Mark Newman
After seeing this global view, let's think small. Let's think about our own personal consumption. For some serious procrastination, I mean, educational fun as your Friday afternoon slowly ticks by, check out the EPA's version of water pac man. I am ashamed to admit that I had to play the game twice to get all the questions correct. I really never realized we personally use as much as we do. And do watch out for the bad-guy water-wasters; my favorite is Swirly. Happy Friday.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

A Closer Look at CO2

There's a lot of hype about CO2 these days concerning its emissions, reductions, dangers, sources of, etc. etc, and we all love to blame this tiny little molecule for destroying the world, but what actually is going on here? And I don't know about you, but whenever a building or product or business or whatever it may be says it's going to cut emissions by 'X'  metric tons, I never know what that really amounts to. Is it worth a good pat on the back? Or is it like our lovely government priding themselves for saving 'X' million dollars on such-and-such when really that's just pennies in the jar of their overall budget. To us common folk, these numbers sound big and they sound important, but you have to ask yourself, how big does the number need to be to really mean anything?

Here's what it all comes down to.

Everything from factories to people to animals, forests, and oceans omit CO2. Is that bad? Well, it's kinda part of life, so not exactly. Now, I'm not here to argue about global warming and whether it's our fault or simply nature's cycle, but what the numbers are telling us is that humans and manmade things produce only a tiny fraction of what the rest the greenery and water bodies produce. The kicker is that the latter two items are able to absorb equal amounts if not more of CO2 to keep the atmosphere within check. Simply the tiny bit extra that we're adding is supposedly creating an imbalance in the system. Whatever source you check, exact numbers will vary, but the percentages are roughly the same. See here for a graph that may put this into perspective.

Nature does a great job of  gobbling up CO2,  but it can only take so much 


OK, so back to the question of CO2 reductions and what those quantities really mean. The EPA has a great online Greenhouse Gas Equivalency Calculator to give equivalents to help us understand this vague concept. For example, if we were to take a commercial building who claims to reduce emissions by 50% saving 600 metric tons annually we can see that:

600 metric tons of CO2
= annual greenhouse gas emissions from 100 cars
= annual electricity use for almost 70 homes
= annual amount sequestered from over 100 acres of forest
= burning 3 railcars worth of coal
.......... etc, etc.

Sounds like a lot, right? But in the grand scheme of things, not so much. For a rough number, let's just say that total annual manmade emissions is about 30 gigatons or 30 Billion tons. Saving 600 may not sound like a lot (only about .000002%), but if all buildings (which amount to about 40% of emissions in the US) were to cut back, the effect could be quite significant. This will be a whole other post in itself, but the 2030 Challenge has the aim for buildings to do just that, to taper down their energy consumption to eventually be carbon neutral by 2030. An aggressive goal, but completely doable considering the technology is out there to make this happen. More to come on this later....

So just think, if buildings account for 40% of the 30billion metric tons of CO2, that's 12billion tons. Cutting this down to zero could potentially put our environment back in balance. Yes, there's a lot of variables to consider with this one, and no, ALL buildings will never be completely net zero, but hopefully this puts things a bit more into perspective.

A few more fun links:

A team or US scientists have devised a way to graph CO2 emissions on a more local level to help pinpoint major problem areas.
Carbon Emissions at Street Level

A new study shows that using sustainably managed forests helps in the fights agains CO2 (another reason to use that FSC wood!)
Can Growing Trees for Fuel actually cut down on CO2 Emissions?

The US has some cutting back to do!
List of Countries by Greenhouse Gas Emissions