Location: Red Hook, NY
Size: 236,000ft²
Building Type: 6-story Office Building
Climate Zone: ASHRAE Climate Zone 4
University of Oklahoma
ARCH 5832: Building Performance Analysis
BASELINE ENERGY MODEL
The baseline energy model for this project is is a 6 story 36,000ft² brick building in the neighborhood of Red Hook, NY. This building is in ASHRAE Climate Zone 4. The baseline model has an EUI of 85.6 kBtu/ft²/yr. The baseline model considers a range of options for the building design. For the purpose of this project, the baseline model is the average of all of these options, and our new model will focus on lowering the EUI through the exterior elements such as Roof, Walls, Glazing, and Infiltration.
CHANGES
WALLS
We changed the baseline model from the full range of options to only using 12.25-inch SIP wall construction. We also adjusted the window to wall ratio to be 30% for the North, South, East, and West sides of the building. These changes to the walls decreased the EUI by 9%.
ROOF
The next change we made to the model was the roof. By changing the roof construction to R60, the EUI decreased by roughly 1.5%. This was not as significant a change as we had hoped to see, but still made an impact overall.
WINDOWS
Another change made was to the windows. We adjusted the North, South, East, and West window glazing to all be Triple Low E glass. In addition to the glazing, we adjusted the window shading on all four building faces. The new window shades are 2/3 the window height on top only. These changes lowered the baseline EUI by 8%.
INFILTRATION
Finally, we adjusted the building infiltration. Adjusting the infiltration system to 0.17 ACH dropped the baseline EUI by a little more than 1%. This was not the change we hoped to see, but still made a small impact.
CONCLUSION
For this project we first looked at the baseline model that gave us an EUI of 85.6 and then made separate scenarios for each modification. By analyzing our modifications in this way, we were able to look at the individual EUI decreases for walls, roof, windows, and infiltration separately. Finally, we made an overall model that combined all modifications to see the overall impact. In our final model with all modifications, we were able to make our new EUI 72.6, making an overall EUI decrease of 15%. The biggest impact to the EUI decrease came from modifying walls with a 9% decrease and the second biggest impact coming from the windows with an 8% decrease. We expected to see a bigger EUI impact from the roof and infiltration than the results we got. We chose to leave these changes in our final project even though they didn’t make the same impact to the model we had theorized in our original thesis. Another interesting factor was that when we made our final model with all changes together, the overall EUI drop did not match up to the equivalent of the individual EUI drops added together.