Long Beach Sustainability Project Balances Technicalities, Community Service
From eSociety, July 2017
By Mary Kate McGowan, Associate Editor, News
While Long Beach was preparing to host ASHRAE’s 2017 Annual Conference, the ASHRAE Southern California and Orange Empire Chapters gave back to a Long Beach family.
To help offset the environmental impact of hosting a conference, ASHRAE members participate in a community service project, a sustainability project, that is local to where a conference is hosted.
The Long Beach Sustainability Project helped a family of three retrofit their Long Beach home with an energy-efficient air-conditioning unit, according to Joanne Choi, Associate Member ASHRAE, who serves as the Sustainability Project Chair for the Southern California ASHRAE chapter.
The home’s residents included a mother, a father, who is disabled with congestive heart disease and is unable to work, and their son, who has autism spectrum disorder and cerebral palsy, according to Choi.
The family has lived in their home for more than 20 years without central air or a cooling system. In the summers, the family would use a portable cooling unit to help cool down one room.
“They could only afford one, and they would put that in the master bedroom. And they all slept in there together,” she said. “It was the mom’s childhood home.”
Working with Rebuilding Together Long Beach—an organization that transforms and revitalizes low-income communities in Long Beach—the project included three parts: conducting an audit of the home and specify and procure equipment from local communities, working during a volunteer day, and giving a presentation on energy efficiency and incentives at a Rebuilding Together Long Beach meeting.
On June 3, an ASHRAE team of 10 people helped install the equipment and ductwork, new windows, and an attic fan and installation during the “volunteer day.”
HVAC contractors removed the home’s old furnace and drew out where members needed to cut to make room for the new HVAC unit’s ductwork and other tasks, Choi said. The ASHRAE team spent several hours completing the tasks before the contractors installed the system that included a four-ton 80% AFUE furnace with matching high-efficiency, multi-position evaporator coil and a 14 SEER four-ton condenser.
The team also installed insulation that was blown in fiberglass and R-30 rated, Choi said.
“They gave us what we could do without having to be a contractor,” she said.
Not only did the project help the family, the experience proved professionally stimulating for the participating ASHRAE team, which consisted mostly of engineers who work in office settings designing and planning systems for commercial buildings and multi-family housing projects, Choi said. She said the project showed the team what goes into installing a system, which helps them better appreciate the hard work.
“A lot of us are engineers who just sit in the office...We’re not really in the field too much,” she said.
Even though the 2017 Annual Conference wrapped up on June 28, the Long Beach Sustainability Project is not complete.
The chapters are planning to share energy-efficiency tips and incentives to help Rebuilding Together Long Beach increase energy efficiency in Southern California at the organization’s general volunteer meeting in July.
Meet the Long Beach Sustainability Project Volunteers:
Jose Pineda, P.E., Associate Member ASHRAE, Southern California ASHRAE Chapter
Jeff Conrad, Member ASHRAE, Orange Empire ASHRAE Chapter
Mark Berry, Affiliate ASHRAE, Southern California ASHRAE Chapter
Phillip Tan, Affiliate ASHRAE, Southern California ASHRAE Chapter
Yun Kim Cheong, Associate Member ASHRAE, Southern California ASHRAE Chapter
Aditya Dharane, Associate Member ASHRAE, Southern California ASHRAE Chapter
Joanne Choi, Associate Member ASHRAE, Southern California ASHRAE Chapter
Ricson Chude, P.E., Member ASHRAE, Southern California ASHRAE Chapter
They volunteered for the Long Beach Sustainability Project and helped a family of three retrofit their Long Beach home with an energy-efficient air-conditioning unit.