Rain water reuse, what's that all about?

     If you asked me as a designer 8 years ago to figure out a way to capture rain water and repurpose it for other uses I probably would have cringed. Living next to one of the largest fresh water bodies in the USA we typically take fresh water for granted, unless sewage is discharged into our fresh water supply. Looking back to the title of this article, "Rain water reuse, what's that all about?", to us its greatest payback conserving our environment by not over taxing our sewage treatment plants with fresh clean water forcing them to allow our basements to backup or discharge mixed wastes into Lake Michigan. Nobody that I have ever designed a system for has ever said, "I'm doing it for the money". Milwaukee has taken an excellent lead in this department in our area. Urban Ecology Center was from my experience one of the first establishments to embrace this concept. Since the their initial installation many more Milwaukee land owners and developers have joined in an effort to effectively collect the rain water from their roofs and reuse it for lawn irrigation and other means. Over the past few years I have had the privilege of helping to design these systems with the help of landscape architects, irrigation contractors and equipment specialists. The UWM Dormitory referred to as Cambridge Commons, installed an elaborate system to harvest the rain water from their upper roof and convey it to a pair of internal filters then stored underground tank which is buried in their courtyard. When the weather station on the roof determines that it would be an ideal time to irrigate the courtyard, a pumping station is energized deep in the bottom of the storage tank and the flow of rain water is directed through a labyrinth of piping and zone valves until the demand is satisfied. So what happens in a draught? One method is to have a secondary water supply, usually municipal water, either fill the cistern to a minimal level to irrigate just enough if a call for water is needed. A second option can be a motorized three way valve that is actuated, again supplied by municipal water, to pressurize the irrigation piping until the demand is satisfied. The current project that I am working on for Dominion Properties employs a different more passive approach which is draught tolerant vegetation.
    
     If this sounds appealing to you, you may want to know what the next steps are. I can highlight a few important ones for you:

1. Research what incentives are available for what types of systems you are interested in this might dictate your next steps.
2. Familiarize yourself with a system to help you understand the space and utilities that might be involved.
3. Get a team of knowledgeable people on board to help you design a system and the infrastructure needed to support the system you have chosen. Without having this the submittal and installation process will be painful and cost you more money in the end.

The BIM Chasm

     Well its been some time since the last Blog was made so I thought I would go back to the drawing board. We are increasingly being pushed into BIM modeling as projects unfold however there seems to be a great chasm. As we bid on the projects the developers want us to have all of the credentials to model and analyze BIM models but do not want to pay for the line item in the contract. I guess in these times that shouldn't be a line item now and just the standard. Unfortunately the added expense of BIM modeling has to be absorbed some how then by the engineering firm or design build contractor yet our bottom line cannot change. To further complicate things, some architects and structural engineers are reluctant to share the model on smaller jobs for an MEP designer to even start to get their feet wet with the experience. The only experience that the designer has ever then known is what he sat an a 3 day course in a training in a lab environment with perfect file associations and no hiccups. When BIM modeling first hit the ground it was supposed to be a central model in which the model was shared by all and as changes were made by various disciplines the model would update and refresh via prompt or automatically. But now if you are on a project using a BIM model you get periodic updates weekly or monthly from the architect or structural engineer, spend half a day resolving conflicts, purging unused content, addressing unresolved links then you can start moving all of your 3D elements to accommodate the changes made. Let me be clear it sometimes takes even longer to accurately build a 3D model of piping than it does to actually install it, and twice as long to change it. Now for the third. You spend a whole year building and tearing down these models fighting for every inch of space in the ceiling, countless hours of details explaining why you cant make your materials fit, resolving interference clashes only to have to try and dumb the model down and try to relay all of your hard work on paper. Four, you realize there is no human way to incorporate all of your thoughts onto paper with every dimension and elevation so you get everyone geared up with $4,000 laptops and tablets with the idea in mind that they can "navigate" through the model and install everything just where you modeled it, and at the end of the day all the trades get together and have a group hug, not even close. The plans get thrown into the garbage, the fancy toys get used to look up funny You Tube clips (on a good day) and the trades get together and argue over the next several months about where everyone is supposed to be installing their systems. The building gets built with little or no regard to the "model" and everything still manages to fit the good old fashioned way teamwork. But wait, what about the "as-builts" oh yeah, repeat everything you did for the past year attempting to cypher out hieroglyphics and red scribbles on the paper plans that were dragged from floor to floor and sink more money into a job that is already cut down and losing and since it was in the contact documents you need to furnish the as-built model to the owner as part of the closeout documents. Now to be fair we have done some jobs where everyone was contractually obligated to follow the model and things worked out fairly well, however the reality is the perfect building was still trying to be built in an imperfect world by imperfect people on a deadline that was way too tight because all of the "BIM Modeling" ate up the front end schedule and budget, go figure. If you would like to see how this works you can check the video out on our webpage http://www.alpineplumbinginc.com.
 So what's the answer? Who knows, maybe there will be a part 2 of this or a bridge over the BIM Chasm.

Solar Panel Rendering

As a plumbing designer and installer, I have been struggling to convey to the customer what their project will look like in the after the installation. For some reason or another, photos of existing installations just don’t do the trick. Another hurdle that I have recently overcome was designing the solar arrays on a building that doesn’t even exist yet. The structural team needed a layout of the arrays on the roof to properly design the structural reinforcement needed to accommodate the new weight of the panels and added snow loads. Ordinarily to calculate the number of solar panels and location you need to first determine the amount of solar shading that you will receive in a given location. The Solar Pathfinder has been the tool of choice in the solar industry for years, but you need the physical site to utilize the tool. I currently use AutoCAD MEP 2010 for all my piping plans for coordination and submittal of construction documents. The software comes with a multitude of tools to help visualize the end product of your system. This gave me the inspiration to use this to consider the physical and esthetic attributes that the panels can have to a building’s architecture. With a picture you are only limited to a display from one point of view. Being able to model the objects in 3D, apply geographical information to the model, along with a date and to jazz it up little some materials you are able to render a very realistic picture of what the project will look like. When the customer decides that they want to see what it would look like from a different point of view or you decide there is not enough sunlight in your location you can move objects around or create and create a different view or create a video.






Proposed Solar Array Layout for UW Milwaukee's New Dorms

This would be the sun at 11:00 on 4-24-09.

"It Aint Easy Being Green?"

With the new construction industry focusing on energy savings more than ever, as plumbers we are becoming forced into keeping up with the latest trends in energy conservation. When being energy efficient was a perk to a project it meerly became a matter of price. Most of the time it was more expensive to build houses with higher efficiency ratings than conventional building practices would achieve. Solar thermal energy has really taken off in the plumbing industry to compliment the growth in energy efficient buildings. Integrating solar domestic water heat with a primary water heating system has never been so advantageous. In most cases the cost of the installation is offset drastically through rebates offered through local utilities and federal tax incentives. When taking into consideration the incentive programs, tax incentives, inflation and the increase in energy costs a solar water heating system typically pays for itself in energy saved in 10-15 years. The typical life expectancy of a system is approx 30 years and in our climate we can expect to offset approx. 50% of our combined annual water heating costs.

I believe now more than ever is the time to consider implementing a solar water heating system into your new or existing house. Nobody is certain but eventually I believe that the utility companies and incentive companies are going to start running dry on their funds. In addition to a lack of funds it may no longer be a option for long not to integrate solar energy into your house.

Autodesk Quantity Take Off

Back in June Autodesk released its version of a bill of material program to use in conjunction with DWF's. For several years Autodesk's third party add-ons like Quickpen and CAD MECH have included this with their program but for a hefty price. I recieved a trial version of QTO (Quantity Take Off) shortly after it was released and was disappointed. I expected to be able to export my 3D DWF to the program and have it spit out a material list, thus justifying the $1995.00 price tag. The program seemed to be able to pick up on pipe fittings and their quantities pretty well but pipe and pipe lengths were another story. So far there is not much support for the product being so new but the Autodesk rep. had some work-arounds and assured me that the glitches would be taken care of in the next release. The program had some good features that allowed you to assign monetary values for each of the items to produce a cost associated with your BIM and BOM.

Before I pulled my hair out with the program pulled my hair out with scheduling inside of AutoCAD MEP 2008. Once I figured out how to properly setup a schedule using property data sets calculating the materials was a breeze. This method had some hiccups in it as well. To schedule pipe lengths and add their totals up and give you a sum the easiest way I could find was to isolate each pipe size and the create a schedule for every size. The only way you could isolate pipes based on their size was to have all the piping into one drawing which made my machine puke on several occasions. The fittings and MvParts were no problem to schedule. I could even schedule them through xrefs and the schedules updated when changes were made. When I schedule piping through xrefs it would spit out on large table with only a sum of all pipe in the drawing instaed of a sum of each specific size. I think the next release of QTO will be benificial to purchase, but for know I will continue to pull my hair out with only one program. I found a clip on You Tube with Brian Haines giving a demonstration as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q90ynbvQo40

AutoCad MEP 2009 SP1

I downloaded SP1 the other day and to my dismay some crippling issues still were not resolved.
1) When you edit a piping through an xref in place the piping does not stay connected to the fittings attached. Normally when using the grip edits (the largest advantage to MEP), all the fitting move with the pipe and you then have sucessfully been more productive than vanilla CAD drafting practices, in 2009.... "not so much".

2) This was not necerssarily an issue resulting from 2009 but I thought it would be worth mentioning: Adding Mvparts, there should be an option similiar to pipe adding to lock elevation. Most of the time I find myself having to go back in and change the elevations after the equipment placed.

If any of you out there have any other Beefs let me know.