Now Accepting 2012 Product Show Vendor Sign Ups

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City of Fresno Request for Proposals for preparation of a Master Environmental Impact Report

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Technical Tour of the New Fresno County Regional Forensic Center

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Understanding The New SWPPP Regulations

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CSI West Region 2011-2012 Membership Directory & Specification Guide Ad Rates

Understanding LEED® EB: A Whole Building Approach for Existing Buildings

Understanding LEED® EB: A Whole Building Approach for Existing Buildings
NEW CLASS A7839
Tuesday, May 24
8:30 am – 4:30 pm


Using LEED to create consistency and prevent “greenwashing”, building owners, operators, and facilities engineers can establish and implement goals to maximize operational efficiency and minimize environmental impacts.


Attend this seminar to learn how to track and quantify operations, improvements and maintenance of the functions of buildings to the functions of the building users. LEED EB addresses the whole picture of the building once it is in use. This class also offers guidance for professionals seeking to take the LEED AP O+M Exam.


7 AIA/HSW Learning Units


For more information and to register contact Lionel Moreno at (559) 625.7127 or email: lionel.moreno@sce.com

CSI Fresno May Meeting

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Cool It With Concrete

“Cool It With Concrete”

By Paulette Salisbury, FCSI,  CDT

How can the color of a pavement make it more sustainable? The answer lies in the materials chosen by design engineers and public works agencies. Long known for its durability and strength, concrete has withstood the test of time on millions of miles of highways and local streets and roads. Now another attribute of concrete pavements is emerging as a benefit to owners, engineers and citizens. Concrete’s light color improves light reflectivity and makes it a cooler material for pavements, roof tiles and building facades. Concrete has been recognized as a solution to the Heat Island Effect by the US Secretary of Energy, Dr. Steven Chu.

Urban areas are usually warmer than their rural surroundings, a phenomenon known as the “heat island effect.” Heat islands can affect communities by increasing summertime peak energy demand, air conditioning costs, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, heat-related illness and mortality, and water quality. 

Portland cement concrete absorbs less energy from light so it stores less heat and thus has a cooler surface temperature than black pavements such as asphalt. Typical summertime pavement surface temperatures can range from 120-150 degrees. Dark pavements hold heat internally and re-release it at night. Hot pavements also heat stormwater and run-off that flows into local waterways decreasing the water quality and its ability to support plants, fish and wildlife.

In many U.S. cities, pavements represent the largest percentage of a community’s land cover, compared with roof and vegetated surfaces. As part of EPA’s Urban Heat Island Pilot Project Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is investigating the impact of utilizing light-colored paving materials including concrete to reduce temperatures and the green house gas (GHG) emissions associated with energy production.

While decision-makers generally choose paving materials based on the function they serve, many private and public owners are considering how the pavement can provide a dual role in reducing energy bills from excessive air conditioning as well as providing a smooth, stable long-lasting driving or parking surface. Studies show that parking lots typically make up a large portion of paved surfaces in urban areas and therefore most of the research has been done on them. Streets, roads and highways also have a significant impact on urban temperatures. Support is growing among public works agencies for using concrete overlays on asphalt roadways to improve the longevity of the pavement and increase reflectivity thus “cooling” the environment. Recent “thermographic” images show the ambient temperature an average of 15 to 20 degrees cooler on concrete surfaces than asphalt pavements.

The US EPA’s Cool Pavements Compendium indicates that concrete is one of the most readily available   solutions for the heat island effect. They also explain that concrete’s high albedo or solar reflectance is 40% compared to black asphalt at 5%. Concrete’s albedo can be increased to 70% by using slag or white cement. (http://www.epa.gov/heatisld/resources/pdf/CoolPavesCompendium.pdf ).

Even when a concrete pavement is worn and dirty its solar reflectance is high (about 25%) while asphalt may get lighter in color as the petroleum-based matrix wears away or ages  reaching a maximum reflectance of 15-20%. At this point the asphalt usually needs to be resurfaced in a perpetual maintenance cycle making it black again diminishing its solar reflectance.

Concrete’s light reflectivity makes it an ideal material to enhance night time visibility. An AASHTO standard illustrates that illumination demands are roughly 40 to 50 percent lower for concrete pavements than for asphalt pavements. Another report comparing the two pavement types suggested a cost savings of as much as 31 percent in initial energy and maintenance costs for lighting concrete pavements. This finding is important for municipalities where utility costs associated with street illumination are often a large budgetary item.

In order to create sustainable communities architects, engineers, public works agencies and all government officials need to embrace all options. Concrete as a building and paving material is clearly one of the most promising solutions. 

 

"If you look at all the buildings and if you make the roofs white and if you make the pavement more of a concrete type of color rather than a black and if you do that uniformly, that would be the equivalent of... reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars in the world by 11 years – just taking them off the road for 11 years.”   

Stephen Chu – Energy Secretary

CSI Fresno March Meeting

 

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CSI Fresno | February Program

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Research the Building Code

There is a free way to research the building code!

Happy New Year to all. Again this year brings new laws that all of us in the building industry have to add to our already voluminous collection. Almost no media outlet seems to produce a list and summary of these new statutes that many of us have to deal with at some level.

First, there are the building codes. Most all of us in the construction business are aware of these. What many people don't know is that you can now access these codes for free. Summaries of the changes in these documents are available from other sources.

The newest requirement of the bunch is the now mandatory CalGreen Code. Summaries of this new one are available. The biggest item in this code is that how it applied varies between jurisdictions. Adjacent cities can have widely different implementations. Anecdotally, most cities I've heard about have elected the minimum standards. But then there is always the "peoples repuiblic of [_fill in the agancy of your choice_]". Some cities are known for being zealots of some kind.

The International Code Council has the California modified version of  their model codes available on their website. Plumbing and Mechanical codes are also now available on the web, through the efforts of the Building Standards Commission.

New to California is a "Guide to Title 24" created by the Building Standards Commission to assist ALL users in the interpretations and use of these codes. It is available on the BSC website in PDF format.

Active Building code listings and their hyperlinks to the individual code websites are below. Of course you can still order the paper versions that I believe are easier to read and reference..

·         Title 24‚ Part 1, 2010 California Administrative Code (First Printing), PDF Version available.

·         Title 24‚ Part 2, 2010 California Building Code (First Printing)

·         Title 24‚ Part 2.5, 2010 California Residential Code (First Printing)

·         Title 24, Part 3, 2010 California Electrical Code, NO FREE WEB VERSION AVAILABLE - This Code is preassembled with the 2008 National Electrical Code (NEC) of the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA).

·         Title 24, Part 4, 2010 California Mechanical Code

·         Title 24, Part 5, 2010 Plumbing Code

·         Title 24‚ Part 6, 2010 California Energy Code (First Printing), PDF Version available.

·         Title 24‚ Part 7, Formerly the Elevator Safety Construction Code. This is now covered by Title 8 - Industrial Relations, of the California Code of Regulations.

·         Title 24‚ Part 8, 2010 California Historical Building Code, PDF Version available.

·         Title 24‚ Part 9, 2010 California Fire Code (First Printing)

·         Title 24, Part 11, 2010 California Green Building Standards Code (First Printing), PDF Version Available

·         Title 24‚ Part 12, 2010 California Referenced Standards Code (First Printing), PDF Version Available

Note that Errata and Supplements may not have been included in the web versions. You'll also need to check the ICC Errata page.

Older codes (2007) for projects already submitted to building agencies or approved for construction are still available at the ICC Website and the BSC website.

·         Title 24‚ Part 1, 2007 California Administrative Code (First Printing)‚ includes Supplements through Jan 10

·         Title 24‚ Part 2, 2007 California Building Code (First Printing)‚ includes Supplements through Jan 09

·         Title 24, Part 3 - 2007 California Electrical Code

·         Title 24, Part 4, 2007 California Mechanical Code

·         Title 24, Part 5, 2007 Plumbing Code

·         Title 24‚ Part 6, 2007 California Energy Code (First Printing)‚ includes Supplements through Jan 10

·         Title 24‚ Part 7, 2007 California Elevator Safety Construction Code

·         Title 24‚ Part 8, 2007 California Historical Building Code (First Printing)‚ includes Supplements through Jan 09

·         Title 24‚ Part 9, 2007 California Fire Code (First Printing)‚ includes Supplements through Jan 09

·         Title 24‚ Part 10, 2007 California Existing Building Code (First Printing)

·         Title 24, Part 11, 2008 California Green Building Standards Code (First Printing), PDF Version available.

·         Title 24‚ Part 12 2007 California Referenced Standards Code (First Printing), PDF Version available

The part that always gets us as design and construction professionals are the laws and statutes that the legislature creates in areas other than the building codes. For once I thought we should be made aware of them. That is the subject of my next article.

Richard Gonser, AIA CSI CCCA SCIP LEED is an independent Consulting Architect and Specification Writer in Southern California. He can be reached at  SpecStudio@verizon.net. If you would like a copy of this article with active web links, please send me a request by email.