The Yudelson Associates Blog: What's New

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Water-free Urinals:  An Excerpt from Jerry Yudelson’s “Green Building A to Z”

Urinals waste more than 150 billion gallons of fresh water per year, equivalent to the water use of 1,500,000 homes, at an average use of 300 gallons per day per home.157 The average urinal installed since 1992 uses 1 gallon per flush, which is the code requirement, based on the 1992 federal Energy Policy Act. (Overall, the average might be closer to 2 gallons per flush for all urinals now installed.) Think of more than 78 million men at work,158 making an average of three flushes per day, five days a week, most of them older urinals using 2 to 3 gallons per flush, just to flush away a liquid that’s sterile and more than 99% water.

The design of water-free urinals includes an oil seal below the drain, which prevents sewer gases from rising up (one of the purposes of the flush and the drain) into a bathroom. The seal has to be changed periodically. According to one manufacturer:

This pleasant-smelling sealant liquid trap provides an airtight barrier between urine and the restroom to prevent odors from escaping the drain, but allows urine to pass through because it is lighter than water. Urine immediately penetrates the sealant liquid and flows to the drain. Uric sediment is collected by the cartridge, leaving an odor-free environment, clean pipes and absolutely no water waste.159

Basically, water-free urinals work just fine in situations where there is a large, often anonymous population of users, such as office buildings, restaurants, airports, schools, stadiums and theaters. With proper design and installation, routine maintenance (including quarterly treatment-cartridge replacements) and a little signage to tell users what’s going on, water-free urinals work just fine, reducing overall water consumption in buildings by up to 40,000 gallons per year per urinal.

Water-free urinals are used in such places as the Jackie Gleason Theater in Miami Beach; the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington; the Harold Washington Social Security Center in Chicago; the twin Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, in Atlanta, Georgia. Over the long run, widespread adoption of water-free urinals will also help reduce future infrastructure development costs by reducing water demand and sewage generation. From the standpoint of economics, water-free urinals, either in new buildings or in renovations, pay for themselves in water savings in a relatively short period of time.

This is an excerpt from Jerry Yudelson’s book, Green Building A to Z: Understanding the Language of Green Building.

Click here to download the PDF version.

Posted by Sky on 01/15/2008 at 05:45 PM

This entry has been viewed 320 times.

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Thermal Energy Storage:  An Excerpt from Jerry Yudelson’s “Green Building A to Z”

Thermal energy storage is a simple concept: make ice or chilled water when power is cheap, then avoid buying electricity to operate mechanical cooling systems when it is expensive. Just about any large office building, hospital, hotel and similar 24/7 facilities can benefit from thermal energy storage. As utilities are forced to increase peak-period electrical rates to short period of time.

avoid brownouts and blackouts on summer afternoons by limiting demand, thermal energy storage systems are beginning to come into their own. They reduce the pressure on the electrical grid and can save building owners considerable money. They also can save money up front, even after paying for their cost, by limiting the size of the HVAC system purchased. They should be thought of as a component of an integrated design project, where the initial focus is on reducing the need for summer air conditioning through overhangs and shading devices, better glazing and passive solar design approaches, not as an end in themselves.

Consider the example shown in the table on page 169. By applying thermal energy storage, the building’s electrical demand is lowered by 400 kilowatt, about a 25% reduction in peak demand. If the utility charges $10 per kilowatt, not an unusual amount, the monthly savings from demand avoidance alone could be $4,000, or nearly $50,000 per year! These savings can continue for many months beyond the peak summer cooling period, because utilities often charge for the instantaneous peak power use in a quarter, or sometimes in an entire year. If time-of-day rates are available from the local electric utility, making power cheaper to buy during off peak hours, the energy cost to produce the cooling would also be lower, further increasing the cost savings from installing the system (only about 10% of ice storage systems provide the full cooling load). In themselves, electric utility “demand avoidance” charges provide complete economic justification for partial storage systems. Time-of-day rates are not needed, but a faster return on investment will occur with them.

This is an excerpt from Jerry Yudelson’s book, Green Building A to Z: Understanding the Language of Green Building.

Click here to download the PDF version.

Posted by Sky on 01/01/2008 at 05:35 PM

This entry has been viewed 327 times.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Salvage Materials:  An Excerpt from Jerry Yudelson’s “Green Building A to Z”

“A penny saved is a penny earned,” wrote Ben Franklin. We care about reusing building materials because of the energy and resources they represent. It takes energy to down-cycle them into recycled-content materials (think of old concrete from a building ground into three-quarter-inch aggregate for use in concrete or as the base material for a parking lot or roadway), so why not use them in their original form instead of throwing them away or using them in some devalued form?

LEED recognizes the value of salvaged or reclaimed materials, such as decorative brick, heavy timbers and other framing lumber, doors, millwork, furniture and partitions, by rewarding projects that use them for at least 5% of the total value of all building materials (not counting equipment). On a typical $10 million (construction cost) project, this would represent $225,000 worth of such materials, not an insignificant amount. One benefit of this practice is the development of local enterprises based on deconstructing buildings and salvaging such materials. If you consider how much useful material is saved from old cars by auto salvage yards in every town, you’ll see the benefit of this practice.

With the advent of Web-based auction sites such as eBay and retail/ wholesale reclaimed building materials stores in most large metropolitan areas, there is now a nationwide market in reclaimed building materials for building projects. So, there is no longer an excuse for not being able to find materials. The only issue is their quality and availability, along with transportation and storage costs.

Some creativity might be required to find and reclaim salvaged materials. The first LEED Platinum project, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation building in Annapolis, Maryland, used large wooden tanks from a former pickle manufacturing facility to harvest rainwater from the roof of their new building. The three tall pickle barrels create a strong visual and architectural element at the building entrance.

This is an excerpt from Jerry Yudelson’s book, Green Building A to Z: Understanding the Language of Green Building.

Click here to download the PDF version.

Posted by Sky on 12/15/2007 at 05:27 PM

This entry has been viewed 374 times.

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Commercial Market Size

But what about cost? If green buildings cost more and certification costs are
onerous,we would expect that most of the activity in green buildings would
be found in government agencies, schools, and universities: institutions
that can afford to take the long view and invest more money up front to
save money on operating costs year after year. That was certainly the case
early in the development and use of the LEED system,when only about onethird
of the project owners (by area, or value) were private corporations.
Lately, however, the pendulum is swinging: private companies and private
developers now represent the majority of LEED projects (ranked by building
area, or value) applying for registration in 2006 and 2007…
Download the full excerpt.
Visit the Books & Resources page.

Posted by Eileen on 12/08/2007 at 06:53 PM

This entry has been viewed 358 times.