A life about making better buildings
I first started learning about buildings when I was 11 years old. My adult sister and her HVAC engineer husband Almo had just bought a 15 room “summer cottage” in Jamestown RI. Almo enlisted me as his assistant gopher and together we did many renovation and upgrade projects together. The biggest job was converting the old 2 pipe steam boiler heating system to a multi zone hot water replacement. While I cut and prepped the copper pipes for soldering, Almo taught me about heating, boilers, radiators and pumps.
I spent my sophomore year of high school at the Milton S. Hershey School in Hershey PA., where all students were required to learn a vocational trade. I got assigned to the plumbing shop. I don’t know whether my teacher Hap Hoerner saw something in me or just wanted to punish me, but he singled me out and taught me how to compute a building heating load calculation on the project house the school shops were building that year. This predated calculators and I did not know how to use a slide rule, so I ran the load manually with pencil and paper and large number arithmetic. The eraser often came in handy.
After college in the early 70’s I spent 5 years in Mounty Holly, Vermont, where I earned my living renovating old farm houses and building log kit cabins and ski houses. This is where I first got exposed to passive and active solar design, modular prefabrication and best practice insulation.
Next I spent several years in Fiji (1976-79) with the Peace Corps teaching construction technology to high school dropouts. I first lived on the remote island of Vanua Balavu and then in Lautoka on the main island of Viti Levu, where I spent most of my time building a classroom workshop building with my students. The extremely high cost of gasoline and electricity on the islands drew me to starting studying appropriate technology, energy efficiency and renewables.
After the Peace Corps, I set out to get a job working with building energy efficiency and got hired by the Region V Chicago office of the US DOE. I was a federal “temperature cop” in Jimmy Carter’s Emergency Building Temperature Restrictions program. This short lived regulation tried to limit heating and cooling set points (65F heating/78F cooling) in commercial buildings. Killing this program was one of the first things that Reagan did after he got elected.
I left DOE when Scott Bernstein at the Center of Technology hired me as the construction manager of CNT’s solar greenhouse project. Looking back this was a prototype “sustainability” project that built 4 solar greenhouses in low income Chicago neighborhoods. My largest project was the 1,000 SF passive solar greenhouse at the First Presbyterian Church in Woodlawn. The space frame structure was designed by Bill Becker (a Bucky Fuller disciple).Bill designed the structural struts for the space frames using 1-inch EMT conduit. Turning Bill’s design into reality under the Chicago building code was an unforgettable and thankfully once in a lifetime experiences. I am amazed that this structure still stands. When I was not building and maintaining greenhouses I was learning about and conducting energy audits. I learned much from John Katrakis about making old buildings energy efficient.
In January 1982 Julie and moved to Chapel Hill, NC to raise a family. A month later, Ish Sud hired me as an energy audit technician at Sud Associates. When I left him 10 years later I was his Vice President for Development. At that time Sud Associates focused exclusively on building energy efficiency: Energy audits, implementation design, research and training. This is where I made my bones in big building energy efficiency particularly regarding HVAC, lighting and controls. I first assisted and later on lead audit teams on what ended up to be hundreds of commercial, institutional and industrial building and facility energy audits. I also got to coordinate, manage and sell a wide range of programs, projects and studies.
In 1992 I went to work for Dave Kirkpatrick at the Durham NC nonprofit SunShares. I managed the Resourceful Buildings department, and my main project was running the Duke Endowment Church Weatherization program. This was a self-help project conceived of by Arnie Katz at the Alternative Energy Corporation (Now Advanced Energy). Arnie had convinced the Duke Endowment to pay for insulation, thermostats and storm windows upgrades in hundreds of rural NC Methodist churches. I recruited the churches, conducted the audits, ordered the materials and trained church members how to install the materials; the churches provided the volunteer work force. I also worked on a number of AEC projects with John Tooley, Bruce Davis, and Francis Conlin. This is where I trained on and gained expertise in the envelope side of building science. focusing on building envelope and energy systems interactions.
SunShares went bust at the end of 1995 and I began consulting on my own first as BWES and now as BWES Building Science. My first long term project was energy code training for NC, SC, GA, TN and KY for Jeff Tiller at Southface. Mike Barcik and I often taught these classes together. Mike was just starting at Southface and I so enjoyed working and mentoring with him.
In the late 1990’s I got to consult and manage a number of projects for Emanuel Levy at the Manufactured Housing Research Alliance. The work included unvented fuel heater pollution research, improving in-plant manufacture and testing, and initializing Energy Star ratings for manufactured housing.
In 2000, Frank Vigil at Advanced Energy hired me to write a crawl space research proposal. DOE funded the project and to my delight, Bruce Davis followed up and hired me to implement and manage the project. I spent the next three years working pretty much full time on crawl spaces. The research results, reports, field knowledge and code changes constitute my signature contribution to building science knowledge to date. During this time I got to work with many building science pioneers including Terry Brennan at Camroden Associates, Achilles Karagiozis at ORNL, Wayne Thomann at Duke University, Bill Rose at UI Urbana, Anton TenWolde at USDA Forest Products Laboratory, and John Straube at the University of Waterloo.
Photo Princeville test site
From 2005-2009 I worked for Mark Smith at Kestrel Management services as a contract staff person. My main job was to provide and manage building science technical support for mold liability insurance policies. These policies targeted low-to-high rise condominium and apartment developments located across the country. My support consisted of performing design reviews, conducting constructing quality assurance evaluations and making loss control inspections during warranty and HOA management.
Photo 10 Rittenhouse Philly
In 2009 I got a call asking if I could air leakage test a large building. This building was the 80,000 SF Soldier Support Center at Fort Lee VA. I had always wanted to test large buildings so I jumped at the chance. I tested it with a support team from Southern Energy Management (SEM) and it passed with flying colors. This was the first building to pass the Norfolk District, US Army Corps of Engineers new and rigorous air leakage test requirement. I was in the right place at the right time and within 2 months I had several hundred thousand dollars of USACE air barrier design consulting and test contracts set up. I joined SEM to better manage the workload and spent 2 years flat out helping USACE design build contractors meet and pass whole building air leakage tests. We reached out to Gary Nelson and Collin Olson at the Energy Conservatory and they were invaluable at upgrading their software to handle large building, multiple fan and multiple test zone requirements.
For a number of years I have been passionate about creative photography, see www.billinchapelhill.com. In 2011 Advanced Energy gave me an opportunity to apply my photography avocation skills to a paid building science gig. My job was to photograph insulation and air sealing repair sequences in residential attics: Easier said than done. Every shoot element was challenging but it did not kill me or make me fall through a ceiling so in the end it made me better. I can’t say the same about my camera equipment.