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.