ASHRAE Journal:
ASHRAE Journal presents:
Allison Hambrick:
Hello and welcome to this episode of ASHRAE Journal Podcast. My name is Allison Hambrick, assistant editor at ASHRAE Journal. Today I'm joined by Max Rohr, Director of Education at Caleffi North America to talk about zero energy buildings and hydronics.
Max, how are you today?
Max Rohr:
I'm doing well. Thanks for having me, Allison.
So I am very excited to talk about this topic because it's something that's near and dear to my heart. I'm the son of a contractor, my dad's a plumber, so I worked with him growing up and used to get paid $5 to tie radiant tube to the ground. And then since then in my career, I've worked at all sorts of different levels in the supply chain for plumbing and heating in North America at the rep and distributor and contractor level. And now I work for a manufacturer and just get to talk about training all the time. So I've loved being in this industry. And yeah, again, thanks for having me on the podcast today.
Allison Hambrick:
Thanks for joining us. To kick things off, what is the best way to sort through energy jargon and buzzwords?
Max Rohr:
So there are a lot of different buzzwords to sort through and different jargon that you would see in a technical journal versus in a report on the news or something like that. What I did is I looked up some of the specific terms from NREL, the National Renewable Energy Labs, to at least get one source's opinion for what these are, but it's a Venn diagram. A lot of these overlap a lot.
So I wanted to start with electrification. So that is just the substitution of electricity for direct combustion. And moving from something that explodes to create fire in some form to a source that is just moving electrons around. So this is best paired with renewables at the grid level. That's a different conversation for a different presenter, I would say. It's how we make the grid better to absorb all of the renewable energies, but that's kind of what electrification is, is that shift from the fuel source.
Then if we looked at carbon-neutral or decarbonized, that would be no net climate impact resulting from carbon or greenhouse gases. This is a tricky one for me because it really depends on the boundary that you establish. So when I lived in the DC area, they had a big push to do zero or to do carbon-neutral in DC by 2050, 2040, I don't remember what the number was. However, they didn't say they would stop using coal powered energy from West Virginia. So if you set the boundary of the District of Columbia, yeah, you could do that. However, if you needed to harvest solar within the boundaries of Washington DC, I went to an ASHRAE meeting at some point where they're like, "There's not enough roof space. There isn't enough roof space in the DC area to be able to do that. We don't have enough wind here. We don't have big hydro if you define that as renewable. We can't quite do it. We need electrons from outside of the boundary." So carbon-neutral, decarbonized really depends on where you set up the fence, but it is something that's important to sort through.
Zero emissions is an interesting one that relates more directly to what our expertise is within the built environment. So that would be building or a community that produces at least as much emissions with free renewable energy as it does from emissions producing energy sources. So maybe an electric bus would be an example. If at ASHRAE headquarters, you had an electric bus that went through the parking lot and picked everybody up, I don't think that the campus is quite that big, but if you had solar panels that charged that overnight, you have a zero emissions transportation structure within that area.
Same thing for the building, if you put a building together that had just enough solar panels to turn on the lights and everything else in the building, that would be great. The perfect example of a zero emissions building would be a tent that you use for camping that is really just a sleeping bag and a tent outside. You don't need propane to heat it, you don't need electricity to heat it, but anything bigger than that in the built environment is going to require some inputs and we're trying to balance the equation there.
So then the last one would be a zero energy building. And this could be a residential or commercial building with a greatly reduced energy need through energy efficiency gains that we make it easy to balance that equation for the energy that it needs to be supplied from renewable technologies. This is a good example of how we balance the equation through energy efficiency. That's kind of the important thing here. We could put a billion solar panels out in a parking lot of a really energy inefficient building, it's going to be harder to get to that zero energy building. The best case is to reduce the amount of energy required to make everybody happy.
Allison Hambrick:
Okay. So switching gears just a bit, what makes for an easier path to a zero energy building?
Max Rohr:
So I've got good news and I've got bad news. This has been an elaborate ploy for a big real estate sale. So we're going to pretend that I'm a commercial real estate agent and I am suggesting that we move ASHRAE headquarters again, even though the ASHRAE team put together that beautiful new building that we'll talk about a little bit later. We're moving. So we're going to move to one of two different places and I'm going to propose two different options for you.
So the first one is a beautiful building. It's about 1.2 million square feet of office space near the Chicago River. It is stunning. It's a big glass skyscraper. It's kind of an interesting building because it looks like it's upside down in a way because the footprint is really small to make room for a walking path to go around the river there. It tapers up a little bit. It's so tippy in nature that the structural engineers had to put in big slosh tanks at the top, so big baffle tanks. So if the wind load is too strong, it doesn't just tip completely over. They had to get creative with how they keep this thing from tipping over. In many ways, it's the perfect commercial building for a lot of people. They love big, fully glass buildings on a really cold river overlooking the rest of the skyscrapers. It's going to be really impressive to say that you work at this 150 North Riverside. It's a beautiful building. Okay, that's option A.
Now, option B is the Springfield Underground. So it's a slam dunk from an energy efficiency standpoint. This is a literal cave that's under the ground. It's one big limestone rock that's under Springfield, Missouri. It is a constant 62 degrees Fahrenheit year round, so there are a lot of other tenants of this space. They store cheese there to keep it cool. There's a lot of critical infrastructure that's in here, and it is gigantic. So it is 3.2 million square feet, so plenty of room for ASHRAE to grow there. There are all these basically big cubes carved into the limestone. You can customize them however you want.
A couple cons to this scenario. There are no windows. This is literally rock under the ground. You can drive a truck through it. You can bring an 18-wheeler through it if you need to move a bunch of boxes in at the same time or a lot of cheese into the space or whatever the case may be. However, you will not see the sun the entire day that you're at work. So really, really excellent from a safety standpoint that this is supposed to be a building where even if there was a huge earthquake, the rock would just kind of tip a little bit, but it's a very safe place to be on earth. All of those are the pros. The cons are, it is a literal cave. So I don't know if you want to make an executive decision here and decide which of those places you'd like to move to?
Allison Hambrick:
I mean, maybe I'm the weird one here, but honestly, the underground cave sounds cool, sort of like a supervillain fortress you know.
Max Rohr:
It is. It is very much a super villain fortress. I've taken a tour of it. So that part is cool points as far as the fortress goes. It seems like you're plotting something under there or whatever. However, do you think you're going to get the rest of your team to move underground versus the big skyscraper?
Allison Hambrick:
Absolutely not.
Max Rohr:
Yeah, so that's one of the things that we're up against a little bit here, that the built environment, we are building a lot of, Robert Bean has said this type of thing, we're building a lot of radiators out of glass. That's what we love as commercial tenants. We love these big skyscrapers that if you were looking for a way to dissipate heat, it would be a lot of the modern construction that we see. And you can get as much triple pane glass as you want, if it's floor to ceiling glass for a hundred stories, it's not the most energy efficient way to build a building.
However, we are up against the architectural community with the fact that they want to build above ground and not below ground, which is a mistake from an energy efficiency standpoint, but how can we make these buildings consume less energy to get closer to that zero energy building scenario is kind of what I think is a cool challenge for our industry, and there are lots of ways to do that. So that's kind of what we're up against. We'll take a vote, I guess, with the rest of your colleagues in Georgia to see if we're moving to 150 Riverside or underground, and you can get back to me about that.
Allison Hambrick:
I have a feeling I'm going to lose this one.
Max Rohr:
We'll see if we can find one cubicle there for you. Then you can just have the sound studio underground.
Allison Hambrick:
Actually, from an acoustic standpoint, that could be amazing.
Max Rohr:
All right. So you've got a business case for that. We'll look for one cubicle there.
Allison Hambrick:
Actually, you know what? I may put that in my back pocket and bring it up at our next meeting.
Max Rohr:
Okay, sounds good.
Allison Hambrick:
What are some other examples of creativity and energy efficient building design?
Max Rohr:
One of the things that's interesting, the further I get into this industry and see other people through the ASHRAE network that work all over the world is that a lot of these concepts to make buildings more energy efficient and to move towards this zero energy future aren't new, they aren't things that we invented.
I think that in North America, there's always kind of an arms race that we have that the idea is, okay, well, wait a second, what if we just made a heat pump that could heat water to 211 degrees Fahrenheit? What if we just made everything bigger, faster, stronger? We've overcome the tricky energy equation by just having a bigger machine and then trying to work backwards into the energy efficiency world from there.
That will work. That's one way to do it is to just have a machine that can heat an old skyscraper in New York with 180 degree Fahrenheit water as they replace the boilers with heat pumps, which is not necessarily the right decision in every single scenario, but it is something that your team should look at if moving to a zero energy onsite scenario makes sense to you and you don't want to have a smokestack of any sort coming out of the top of the building, heat pumps are an excellent fit for that. But one of the things that I think is in this industry is very compelling is that the more that you talk to people outside of the US, there are so many creative things that you can do with buildings that aren't just building bigger machines. So one of the questions that I have, it's a very important question today, why do elephants have big ears? And this is not a dad joke. This is a question for you.
Allison Hambrick:
Well, I mean, I would assume they have some scientific function, but to give the elementary answer, perhaps to hear better.
Max Rohr:
They probably do hear better. I think that they hear very well. But they act as a big capillary mat to dissipate heat. So elephants have this radiant cooling system built to the side of their head that they can kind of flap their ears and a lot of blood flows through a lot of capillaries essentially in their ears so they can dissipate heat. So this isn't something that we invented in the lab at a manufacturer or some engineer came up with, an energy engineer 10 years ago. There are so many examples of ways to dissipate heat that are just a good design of a building. There's another animal example, these are all kind of biomimicry examples, which I think are super interesting because animals have adapted to figure out the best way to live in their environment with the least amount of energy. And that's kind of what we're trying to do with zero energy building, so this is going to turn into a zoologist presentation for a couple of minutes here. Hopefully that's what you were up for today.
But polar bears don't show up on a thermal camera because they're so well insulated. So one of my friends lived in Alaska and he said that the polar bears are very sneaky like a cat and they will actually lay down on the snow and then cover their nose with their paw. So they put their paw over their black nose, because the black nose is the only thing that really shows up in an infrared scenario. So they know that their weak point is that black nose, it's something that prey might be able to see in the snowy landscape. Other than that, they're really, really well thermally camouflaged because their insulation is just so incredible.
So that's one of the things that we look at that will come up a little bit later in this conversation too, is that there is a scenario that, well, what if we just insulated these buildings so much better if we just have some, much higher than we ever anticipated R value or U value of insulation for the building, that would be one way to use less energy. Polar bears have to hunt for food all over the place, if they were wearing just the fur equivalent of a light rain jacket, they would need a lot of calories to survive. So that's kind of the same example that biomimicry with polar bears, just having a big jacket on the building is going to be a good way to start and that's why the cave underground is a nice way to do that because there's all that limestone and dirt that's helping insulate everything.
So biomimicry can help us adapt to our surroundings instead of mechanically forcing it and controlling every indoor environmental quality extreme. It's another way to look at this and it's adapting to the surroundings instead of the machine doing all of the work, even though we're very mechanical people as an audience to this podcast, if you found this, we like to control the humidity, the temperatures and everything that we can with some sort of box that's going to be covered in dust and the mechanical space in the basement of a building and force the issue there. A lot of different ways to do this are just adapting to what we have to work with in the environment already, and I think that that's kind of a cool example.
So another thing that I like to bring up in this scenario too is that not all buildings are created the same as we had planned from a BTU per square foot, BTU hour per square foot sense, that as we are looking at designing buildings, there was a time that a building was designed, especially a commercial building like we're talking about downtown in Chicago or where you would move a headquarters. Everyone was anticipated to be a man wearing a suit with a tie. So the buildings were a little bit cooler. You would have to make those spaces a little bit cooler for a boardroom full of guys to be wearing suits. That is not the world that we live in anymore.
So that's kind of an interesting thing that we need to adapt to as well is that a lot of, even if you just look at the clothing levels, a lot of those things have changed in the last 10 years. Some of those are post-COVID that, "Yeah, we're going to loosen up a little bit with the dress code. We don't all have to wear suits." Because of that, we now may be over-cooling just about everything. And there's also a whole different kind of biological difference with how people experience cooling in a space, that there are many offices that I've walked through, that there's the one president or CEO wearing a suit, and then everybody else in that office space is freezing. And that's because they're dressed appropriately for the space, but we're kind of shooting for the warmest common denominator, the warmest outlier, I guess, being the person in a suit.
And that's something that I think is interesting in a different biomimicry sense is that, are we building buildings for the people who work there anymore, or are we building them for this assumption that's kind of a dated concept that anyone who goes to work in an office is wearing a suit and is a man? That's not the world that we live in and we need to reevaluate how we're looking at the spaces that we have even down to the use case of mixed use residential, commercial spaces. Yeah, you definitely don't want to cool the same way in a hot yoga studio that you would for a library. Those are very different amounts of calories per person that we're using and it's going to change the scenario quite a bit. How do we adapt to that and how do we build something that doesn't overcool everything is a way to adapt to the environment a little bit.
And all of this is, again, not new. Some of the coolest, earliest examples of creating comfortable environments for people go way back to Korea and Rome where they were doing radiant heating. So they're doing spa areas and things like that where they were heating water with the most basic of boilers with fire and things like that. There's burning wood to warm water that would go under a big tile structure to keep people warm.
So when we have now PEX pipe and things like that, that we can make radiant heating projects, going back to when I was a kid working with my dad, those were early examples of doing radiant heating and buildings in Park City, Utah where I lived, but that has existed for thousands of years in some different ways. And I think that that's what's kind of fun about ASHRAE too, is that the more that you talk to people outside of North America, they're like, "Yeah, we kind of have done cool stuff like this forever." And building a building that's going to be a good fit for good fit in the environment is key. Another example that I think is kind of fun is there's a termite, I forgot to look up the word before we started termite house, termite-
Allison Hambrick:
Mound.
Max Rohr:
Mound. Okay, termite mount in Zimbabwe that it's called the Eastgate Centre. This is a building that's built to look like a termite mound, and it uses up to 35% less energy than buildings in the area, and there's a cool YouTube video about this, because it kind of naturally ventilates itself as it is warming up, then the buoyant hot air is not impeded as it makes its way out the top of the stack. So just by making more of a passive building, like we can do passive solar by aligning the different awnings and things like that to make sure that we don't just have full sunlight coming directly into the window, those things are really existing in nature and it's kind of fun to look for examples of that. This termite-inspired building in Zimbabwe is like, "Hey, we've seen termite mounds around and we know that that might be a better way to build a building than everything being a glass box."
I hope this is helpful. I know that a lot of the people listening to the call are architects and they're like, "Yeah, we know we don't like these big glass structures either." But I think that there are some cool lessons to be learned from the world out there as far as, how can we build a building that is in the bright sun of the desert, that's going to be 35% less energy than other buildings in the area? That's a good place to start, and then we don't have to use as much machine to get to those balanced equations of zero energy building or net-zero or whatever the word you want to use is there. So those are a couple examples that I think are fun and there are millions of those out there and good things to look for in the built environment.
Allison Hambrick:
Absolutely. Thank you for that. You touched on this a little bit already, but how has the industry changed with regard to energy efficient building design?
Max Rohr:
So when I was a kid, I was involved in, I think the statute of limitations is up here, I was involved in a turf war between the hydronics people and the forced air people, so kind of like the Jets and the Sharks or some sort of rivalry over borders or something like that.
So I was in camp hydronics. My dad was a hydronics contractor, he did radiant heating. I lived in Park City, Utah when I was a kid. Not a lot of cooling up there at the time. Even now, there's not as much cooling as there are in other places like in Atlanta or something like that where you just absolutely have to have cooling. There are plenty of people that just open their windows at night because it gets cold even in the summer. So I was on team hydronics.
At the time, building codes were such that the buildings were leaky enough that just heating the floor and having the infiltration through leaky doors and windows and things like that was enough to give you the air changes that you didn't have kind of a gross, really humid building. It's also very dry in the mountains in Utah. So those were some of the factors that worked in a way that we would say, "You don't need forced air. You don't want forced air. It's not as comfortable. Hydronics is great. Forced air is kind of a mistake up in the mountains. That's a great fit if you live in New Orleans or something like that where maybe the heating season isn't as long, but you're going to love this radiant heated floor and you don't need air conditioning, so don't even worry about that furnace or air conditioner." And then there were the forced air people that were the other side that would say, "Well, why would you buy two machines? We can do heating and cooling at the same time, so you should go that direction."
So that's something that went on for a really long time. It doesn't work anymore because buildings are tighter now. So you can't have the infiltration that's just going to bring the air changes required to keep everybody happy. If you had five people living in a house in Park City, Utah, the building codes are such that you would be living in a Ziploc bag and it would get a lot of, humidity would spike when everybody's home and it wouldn't work anymore. We need to have some mechanical ventilation to balance the equation and to have fresh air, outdoor air for people to breathe and to keep everything up to code, up to ASHRAE 62.1 and 55, which we'll talk about a little bit later too.
So this turf war has ended in a sense that now we need to combine these two trades, which will be an interesting thing to see how that develops over the next 20 years because it's no longer the hydronics people and the forced air people, they both need to work together to build buildings effectively. Hydronics and radiant specifically is an amazing way to go from an energy efficiency standpoint, radiant heating, radiant cooling, it's great for residential projects for heating and then for commercial cooling and heating. It's a great way to take a hot glass atrium and make it manageable without just really overdoing it with mechanical ventilation to try and cool that same space. It's great at addressing that sun coming through into a big glass box scenario. It's an excellent technology.
However, you need to couple it with the forced air team. You need to work with someone who's going to be able to keep the latent load in check. They're going to have to move the air through and adapt to things that can change in a building as far as occupancy goes or the outdoor air conditions or anything like that. We have to work well together. So in a sense, we've now created kind of a heating and cooling super trade that the best of us would know how to work with radiant heating and cooling projects and the force ventilation side of it and build the best structure because we have to. That's just kind of the rules that we're working with now and is something that I think will give even additional value to the people that understand both of them really well moving into the future and is a great skilled trade that has become—two trades have become one and we can all be friends and hang out together after work and not have that rivalry anymore.
Allison Hambrick:
Yeah. Well, now that that West Side Story turf war is over, the question becomes, how do you put those two technologies together?
Max Rohr:
So one of the cool things that you can look to with specific guidance there is, I've done a lot of training about radiant cooling and people are like, "Wait a second, if you just start cooling the floor in a commercial space, it's going to sweat, you're going to have condensation issues, you're going to have people slipping around like it's a thawed out ice rink or something like that. That's not going to work. Just as an engineer, it makes me too nervous to do that type of thing." The good news is there are some boundaries that already existed.
So the two standards that I like to reference that relate to this to kind of bring the forced air people and the radiant people together, all looking at the same rule book would be ASHRAE standards 62.1 and 55. So what we're looking at here with 62.1, if you're breaking the rules of 62.1, you would run into condensation issues with radiant cooling. So it sets a good boundary as far as what we're okay with from a humidity, from a latent load standpoint, how we need to ventilate these buildings. If you don't fall outside of 62.1, you're in good shape. You don't present the conditions that would lead to condensation on a cooled floor.
And then the other side of that equation would be ASHRAE Standard 55 for thermal comfort. So this one is helpful because if you decided to cool your floor in a commercial space down to 42 degrees Fahrenheit, you would be wildly breaking the thermal comfort boundaries of ASHRAE 55. One of the things I love about the industry is that ASHRAE Standard 55 doesn't guarantee comfort, it is discouraging discomfort, in a way. We have to use a double negative there. But if you're in the sweet spot of ASHRAE 55, the floor isn't so cold that it would make you uncomfortable to stand on it. If you were standing on a 45 degree Fahrenheit floor all day at work, your feet would feel very cold like you were standing outside. It wouldn't be acceptable. And it would present a condition that the floor is too cold and the warmer humid air above is going to condense. It just is too cold, there's too much humidity in the air. We've broken a rule with ASHRAE Standard 55 by getting too cold.
So those 62.1 and 55 really give us that perfect set of boundaries to adapt these two technologies together and I think make for a good formula to get the most energy efficiency out. So then we roll into ASHRAE Standard 90.1 where we're looking for a more energy efficient building and that's where the heating radiant cooling is a good fit because it is so energy efficient at moving the sensible loads around, and then we're using the forced air through a DOAS or something like that to keep the latent loads in check, but they're working in tandem to kind of let the best skillset of each of the technologies shine, which I think is a really fun and encouraging thing about the industry.
Allison Hambrick:
On the topic of hybrid systems, we actually have a pretty good case study right here in Atlanta. Can you talk a little bit about how the ASHRAE headquarters integrated both hydronics and a forced air system?
Max Rohr:
Yeah, this is a fun example and something that as an ASHRAE member, I'm proud of because I don't envy the team of engineers, the panel of engineers that had to figure out what the mechanical system for ASHRAE headquarters would be, knowing that all of the eyes in the industry every time somebody comes to visit are going to be looking at like, "Well, why did you use that type of machine? Why are you using these type of heat emitters?" You have to have a pretty solid business case for that from an energy standpoint to have people be comfortable in these spaces. And then also for the ASHRAE staff that are there all the time, you could, again, build a tent that would be very energy efficient. And I don't think that the rest of the staff would enjoy being in a very hot Atlanta summer with no air conditioning. I don't think you would keep a lot of employees there. You might have some turnover there.
So one of the things that's cool about the ASHRAE headquarter, and there are I think two hours of narrated videos on the website about this that past-president Ginger Scoggin narrated that talk about the system with the team of engineers that she worked with to put this together. But it is a really cool hydronics and forced air hybrid system, and it is a good way to start with that zero energy building goal in mind.
So a couple of the fun things about this project, I think, is again, they could have used all of the king's horses and all of the king's men equipment to just overcome the Atlanta hot, humid summer and have a big glass box that was even, it was an existing building. They could have put even more glass in, a big glass atrium and expanded that or something like that, and they could have overcome that.
But instead, which I think is really smart, is they actually went back to more of that biomimicry, look, I don't know if that was a word that was ever name-dropped in the process there, but they looked at it and they said, "You know what? We actually should reduce a little bit of the glazing here. We need to not take all the windows out so we're moving underground or anything like that, but it's going to be easier for us to meet the load of this building if it's not wall to wall ceiling to floor glass."
And that's something that they did change, so the glazing is less than the building that was existing from the 70s. I think all those details are in that video that's on the website, which is really cool and goes through every little detail of this. But they started with a less needy envelope in a sense. They adapted the Polar Bear strategy and they put a little bit more R value, U value to the outside of the structure to reduce the amount of BTUs they would need to keep everybody hot and cold depending on the season. So with that though, they have to bring it up to the envelope code. So they're going to need to move some forced air in the building, and they were able to do that really well.
So one of the things that I wanted to mention as kind of the thesis statement, I guess, for this design group that put together the recommendations here, so Stanton Stafford, the managing principle of Introba Group, Integral Introba Group, said flat out radiant was a more expensive option than the full forced air option. Just to be clear about this, the radiant one was a little bit more expensive. And into the weeds with that, I think it was also a little bit different because there aren't just an abundance of radiant cooling contractors in Atlanta. This is something that's a newer technology to the area, even though there are places in the world that they've been using this technology. But again, you have to adapt to the environment. You can't build some system that nobody can work on in the area. So they had to find someone who would be able to accomplish the mechanical task of putting it together.
So the quote that I have from him is that, "ASHRAE made the decision that they wanted to show a forward-thinking approach to the industry showing that we could put in a different system type, an unconventional system type for the US market, perfectly viable, something that we could use in warm human climates," because radiant cooling has been seen as something that's only a good fit for the deserts of Nevada or something like that. And this is like, no, we can do this right in the heart of the humid part of our country and make it work.
So the last piece of that that I think is really cool is to... They made an envelope less needy, they won't need as many BTUs. They went with a cool hybrid system and then they added solar PV locally. So to balance the equation, to get to that zero energy goal, they needed some more energy on site. So they could have just purchased RECs for renewable energy credits for some landfill gas in Wyoming or however you can kind of trick the equation a little bit there. But they went with the solar onsite, which I think is a very cool way to do that. And they were able to get to that zero energy goal for the ASHRAE headquarters to kind of live the model of how, "No, we can do this, we can do this by using all of the technologies and all of the good planning to meet a zero energy goal, even in an energy intensive, hot, humid Atlanta," which I think is very cool.
So that's something that is important. And to sum that up, one of the things that past-president Ginger Scoggin said is that, "The cleanest energy is energy unused." So going back to that initial thing that I was talking about with the DC area, that just saying we're going to go zero energy in DC and then we're going to use an abundance of new coal in West Virginia is missing something. It may mean that you could walk around DC and not smell any products of combustion in the air and you wouldn't be by a bus stop with a bunch of exhaust fumes coming out of the bus, and some of those things that are creature comforts for people that have that in a city to not have the internal combustion downsides, I guess, in the area, but it's also a very small community. We're not taking buses to the middle of Nebraska or something like that to pick somebody up so it's easier to plug in a bus that's only going to make a three-mile radius around the capital or something like that.
So one of the things that I like about that statement from past-president Scoggin is that let's leave as much energy in the ground in wherever it may be as we can. Let's use energy effectively, efficiently and then we can figure out the best machine to take the local resource that makes sense, and it may be coal, it may be natural gas, it may be solar or wind or tidal energy or whatever the cool new thing is, let's not overuse it. And I think that was kind of the best win for the ASHRAE headquarters is to start early and design the building in a way that it wouldn't be so much of an energy waste to start with.
Allison Hambrick:
See, now you're selling this on not relocating to a cave. So you're kind of hurting my case a little bit.
Max Rohr:
So my career as a commercial real estate agent has started and ended in this podcast, I guess. I didn't make the cut.
Allison Hambrick:
Yeah. Unfortunately, you made a very good pitch for the building that we already own, so you know.
Max Rohr:
Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah, you should probably stay there a little bit longer. You've got a pretty good setup there. And I think that, again, you can go and look at the full design considerations for all the different systems considered on the ASHRAE website and see what that was about and why they picked the system that they did. It's pretty cool.
Allison Hambrick:
Yeah, absolutely. And well, Max, that brings us to the end of our time today. Do you have any parting thoughts for our listeners?
Max Rohr:
Yeah, I think adapt your site first. Look for international examples of things that can make a building a lower energy consuming building first. Find some sort of local animal that you envy, if it's a polar bear or an elephant with its big radiator ears or whatever to see if that can be, termites, if that can be incorporated into your building. And then look for hydronic systems to be part of a hybrid system. I think that there are many places that that combination of the hybrid system with forced air and radiant or hydronics in existing buildings is a good fit and is something that can give you more tools in your toolbox and give you more ways to solve this zero energy equation.
Allison Hambrick:
Max, thank you for sharing your time and insights with us.
Max Rohr:
Thank you.
Allison Hambrick:
And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in to this episode of ASHRAE Journal Podcast.
The ASHRAE Journal Podcast team is editor Drew Champlin; managing editor, Linda Rathke; producer and assistant editor, Allison Hambrick; assistant editor, Mary Sims; associate editor, Tani Palefski; and technical editor, Rebecca Norris.
Copyright ASHRAE. The views expressed in this podcast are those of individuals only and not of ASHRAE, its sponsors or advertisers. Please refer to ashrae.org/podcast for the full disclaimer.