Intel
Wildfire resilience
Wildfire continues to be a risk we are working to understand and implement strategies for in our built environment. Here is an Article from Green Builder discussing some of the strides that have been made towards guidelines for wildfire resilience of homes being driven by new insurance standards.
greenbuildermedia.com
Ladder Access Storage
Following my comments in the last issue about ladder access to a loft area in a Toronto house, I had some great feedback, particularly that some jurisdictions have policies that allow ladders to be used for access to attic storage spaces in houses. In my follow-up, I located this BC Building Code Appeal Board decision that clearly indicates that ladders are permitted to access spaces in dwelling units that do not meet the general design requirements of Section 9.5. and are intended for limited or occasional use.
This appeal is an interesting result, particularly when considering many older house designs often have an attic space that can be used for storage - how many movies or TV shows have we all seen where the characters are in the attic reliving old memories stored there?
Research into Part 9 has revealed a discrepancy with Part 3. Right or wrong, Part 9 does not have a stated prohibition against storage in a service space. Based on this permission by omission, an attic space in any Part 9 building is not restricted from containing storage. And, as a service space, ladder access is permitted. I would suggest that this storage only be occasionally accessed, as would be typical in a house. Storage that is regularly accessed, should be considered an occupancy, with all of the associated requirements being met.
Do you disagree or have other thoughts regarding this discrepancy between Part 3 and Part 9? I love to hear everyone's comments. Email me at bfraser@celerity.ca.
gov.bc.ca
Wisdom
Beyond Default: Architectural Specificity in Generative AI
These days, media coverage makes it feel like AI is going to fleece all knowledge and creative workers right out of all the work we enjoy doing every day. Or, at least this is what all the tech giants seem to be espousing at every opportunity.
Personally, I think that AI has the potential to provide productivity gains, similar to when hand drafting was replaced by CAD, though on a much broader basis. Like it or not, we all will need to embrace AI in some shape or form, though exactly what this will look like is still unclear with regards to knowledge-based work.
Recently, I joined the presentation hosted by Nick Bray Architecture on the use of generative AI in Architectural design, and I was quite impressed by what is currently possible. The creative input of human intelligence is very much still required, but the technical work to create models and renderings seems to be moving quickly into obsolescence.
Have a watch of this presentation, and let me know your thoughts at bfraser@celerity.ca.
youtube.com
Geothermal and Fire Risks
Interest in geothermal energy has become much more mainstream in the last several years. Many of these systems rely on heat pumps to make ground water loops usable for providing heating and cooling for an associated building. Heat pumps are great, particularly for heating, as most of the energy that goes into operating the heat pump to absorb heat from the ground loop water system is delivered as heat into the building instead of being lost. With heat pumps, the type of refrigerant proposed for these systems must be carefully considered and coordinated, as some of the newer refrigerants have a much higher fire hazard risk than older common choices.
Refrigerants used in heat pumps can consist of many different materials, some of which present health hazards to building occupants, such as CO2 (R744) and Ammonia (both have asphyxiation risks), to highly flammable refrigerants such as propane (R290). Older refrigerants, such as R12, caused ozone depletion and were replaced with newer refrigerants that addressed the ozone issue. However, many of those replacement refrigerants, such as R410a, have been found to contribute to global warming and are now also being phased out. Research continues to resolve the many challenges, and many new refrigerants meet efficiency, environmental, and health goals, but increased fire hazard risks sometimes seem to be the tradeoff. These new fire hazard risks can be mitigated, but measures beyond those currently in the Building Code and Fire Code may need to be considered and implemented.
If you are working on a building with a new geothermal or other large heat pump system, coordination between the mechanical and fire engineers will be key to ensuring the fire risks are appropriately addressed.
hrai.ca
Intriguing
Rescuing the Cooling Towers
It is likely the fault of the Simpsons, but whenever I see an image of one of these gigantic cooling towers, it makes me think of a nuclear power plant. However, these cooling towers were also used with other thermal power generation fuels such as coal. When I lived in Germany, I could see the cooling towers of the local coal-fired plant just southeast of Frankfurt am Main.
As a mechanical engineer by training, thermal systems used for power generation were covered in some of my studies, and these towers are used to cool the working fluids (usually water) used in the electrical generation system to increase the efficiency of the system cycle. The river water evaporates when it is sprayed on the heat exchangers at the bottom of the tower, and what might be thought of as "smoke" discharging from the top of the cooling tower, as in the image above, is actually nothing more than water vapour - my wife's cousin in Germany called the cooling towers the cloud factory.
The evaporative cooling process used in these giant towers is the exact same process used to cool many large buildings in our cities. Many large residential and office towers in Vancouver use a warm water loop system that circulates water from the basement to the roof. At each floor, local air fan units use a heat pump to cool the water loop to heat the local space, or heat the water loop to cool the local space. This simple system allows heat recovery from spaces in the building being cooled to be used in spaces being heated. In summer, there is excess heat in the water loop due to net cooling throughout the building and small cooling towers on the roof of the building often use water spray to increase the cooling efficiency of the warm water loop rather than using another heat pump. In winter when there is net heating within the building, a gas-fired boiler or a geothermal heat pump system in the basement heats the water in the loop to provide heat to the building.
The engineer in me finds all this fascinating, and I was very intrigued when I came across this Article in Deezen, which described these gigantic cooling towers as "immensely photogenic". Heavy industry is not as prominent in Vancouver and Western Canada as it is in the East and other parts of the world like the UK, Germany, and parts of France. Particularly, we see fewer of the large-scale older industrial buildings and structures like these cooling towers. The architectural significance of these structures can be easy to dismiss, but like we see with many of our historical structures, they are disappearing, which is a bit of a shame.
dezeen.com
