Straw Bale House Monitoring Project (updated 9/06)
CCHRC, through a grant from Alaska Housing Finance Corporation, is conducting in-house monitoring of three straw bale houses in the Fairbanks area. The monitoring project consists of measuring temperature and moisture gradients throughout the straw bale insulation of the exterior walls. CCHRC staff inspected the vapor barrier during construction and performed blower door tests. Indoor and outdoor air temperatures and wind velocity and direction are being monitored to verify induced moisture levels. A Power Point Presentation illustrating the construction of 5 Straw bale structures in Fairbanks is available. The final draft of the literature search/best practice report is in the final editing. A report incorporating collected data is in progress.
Regional
Housing Authority Technical Support (updated
3/07)
AHFC
continues to fund CCHRC to act in an advisory role to the Alaska Regional
Housing Authorities. CCHRC responds to requests from the Housing
Authorities to address housing issues which are of concern to them
and submit them to AHFC for funding consideration and approval.
The CIHA Mountain View Housing Study is a current
example. We provided a modified Building America floor plan to the
Ninilchik Housing Authority. They built the home and report that
it has been well accepted. Under a separate contract with HUD we
have completed a short survey of mold problems in Alaska Native
Housing. This survey is available under Reports. CCHRC staff have
participated in several mold remediation training for employees
of Alaska Native Housing Authorities in Anchorage and Fairbanks
and have also visited housing managed by the Alaska Housing Authorities
around the state. Our new focus is to establish a rural housing performance monitoring protocol. We are doing this by designing and deploying an instrumentation set in a REMOTE house in Kotzebue.
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Kenai
Indoor Air Quality Study (updated 9/06)
This study is funded by Alaska Housing Finance Corporation to find solutions to some of the most common causes of indoor air quality problems in Southcentral Alaska. John Davies is the Project Manager and Wisdom and Associates are the contractors who monitored 100 homes during the 2003-04 winter. The homes with suspected indoor air quality problems have been monitored for carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, temperature, relative humidity and radon. Each home has also undergone a BEES ventilation check, ultrafine particle sweep and a pressure imbalance testing. The draft final report is being reviewed and will present data from all homes investigated, an analysis of trends or patterns that lead to poor indoor air quality, and recommended solutions.
Frost Protected Shallow Foundation Study (updated 12/06)
This project will use funding from AHFC to purchase equipment and drilling services to install and monitor five thermocouple strings at each of two houses. The basic idea behind frost-protected shallow foundations (FPSF) is that suitable insulation placed outside of the shallow (hence, less expensive) foundation can protect it from heaving due to seasonal freezing. Scandinavian countries have been using this technique for many years and there is guidance in the International Residential Code for FPSF for regions with air-freezing indexes up to 4000-degree-Fahrenheit days. Many areas in Alaska exceed this index. Mr. Paul Perreault, in making this study his thesis project, will be collecting isotherm data from the soil under actual houses, compare that data to the results of computer modeling, and to write a draft specification for the FPSF for inclusion in residential codes that would apply at air freezing indexes appropriate to Interior and Northern Alaska. The thesis work will take four years, but a progress report is available as a CCHRC Snapshot. Click to view FPSF Snapshot.
Permafrost Monitoring under the RTF (9/06)
The permafrost table beneath the future Cold Climate Housing and Infrastructure Research and Test Facility (RTF) is being monitored. Water table observation wells were drilled and surveyed, and subsidence markers placed and surveyed prior to preloading of the RTF building footprint. Two thermistor strings have been installed in 20 foot deep, cased holes. A new multiplexer was purchased and installed in an existing modem. A radio transmitter is used to store and transmit the permafrost data through the Fairbanks Mesonet for real-time display on the Internet along with data from the CCHRC weather station. These real-time data constitute the report for this project. Additional sensors have been installed throughout the RTF bringing the total to approximately 400 current data collection points.
Masonry Heater Efficiency Study (9/06)
CCHRC has contracted with Solutions to Healthy Breathing to develop a protocol for measuring the efficiency and pollutants from a wood burning heater such as a wood stove or masonry heater and to apply this protocol to a masonry heater recently built here in Fairbanks. The contractor met with representatives from the Masonry Heater Association of America and EPA to reach agreement on the measurement protocol. Measurements were made last winter & will continue this heating season. The Masonry Heater in the RTF will also be monitored this winter.
CIHA - Mountain View Housing Study: (1/07)
Objective: Determine if actual performance of new homes heated with boilers and built by the Cook Inlet Housing Authority (CIHA) and new homes heated with furnaces and built by a local contractor for CIHA meet expectations for energy efficiency, homeowner comfort, indoor air quality, and humidity control. Four to six homes of each type will be studied depending on their availability and funding. The project is jointly funded by CIHA and CCHRC. Some equipment is being provided by AHFC and CCHRC. CCHRC is contracting the project to Sunrise Energy Works with collaboration from: Arctic Energy Systems, Analysis North, Flattop Technical Services, and Alaska Building Science Network.
Project
Description: The project will include commissioning of mechanical
systems (ventilation and heating), determination of heating system
efficiency and total cost to operate, measurement of IAQ and thermal
comfort parameters, measurement of humidity and temperature in the
attic and crawl spaces, and calculation of an energy rating for
each house including pressure testing and duct leakage measurements.
The final report will summarize monitoring results and building
performance; identify systems that are performing well, and provide
recommendations on systems or strategies that could be improved. The draft final report and a snapshot is available
. Click to view
Draft Final Report or snapshot 07-001.
CCHRC is reviewing the AKWarm software which is currently used to determine the energy usage of a house in the plans stage. An assessment of additional features to be added is being made. Any modifications required by the current effort to re-write BEES will also be included. The result of these processes will be a scope of work document for the next phase of AKWarm development and an associated request for proposals. Depending upon the responses to the RFP we will likely negotiate a small consulting contract with the original author of AKWarm.
Update: 01/08 - In January 2008, the Energy Rating Program Evaluation was issued with research and recommendations on effective computer software solutions for the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation's Home Energy Program as a part of the AKWarm Project.
The RTF itself is a model to learn from and provide data and research on building performance – to this end, more than 400 sensors have been installed in the building to make it a living demonstration of building system operations and performance. Michael Lilly of GW Scientific is working on this project with CCHRC. This project will produce the following products, which will form the foundation for the RTF Legacy Monitoring Program:
- Report summarizing brainstorming, data gathering, and synthesis efforts
- METADATA Guidelines Manual
- Data Quality Assurance and Quality Control Manual
- Data Network Operations and Maintenance Guide
- Report on educational, training, and outreach recommendations and examples
The outcomes of this effort will be an optimization of the current monitoring plans into a long-term program. The transferability of monitoring efforts will increase through the recommendations based on the brainstorming and statewide survey efforts. The development of a RTF Legacy Monitoring Program will also serve as a foundation for evaluation of future proposal and funding efforts.
At their meeting on November 8th, the AHFC Board of Directors adopted changes to the Alaska Building Energy Efficiency Standard (BEES) proposed by a CCHRC work group (see below for links). For a residential building to qualify for a low-interest loan from AHFC it must meet this standard. It had been more than a decade since this standard had been updated or changed in any way. Since the BEES is supposed to be updated at least every 3 years, significant changes had been made in the ASHRAE ventilation standard, and the cost of energy has risen dramatically, it was clearly time to consider revisions to the standard.
CCHRC was tasked last summer by AHFC to make recommendations for updating BEES. We put together a work group that reviewed the existing BEES, changes that were proposed in the previous review, other suggestions that had been made to AHFC for changes, the new ASHRAE residential ventilation standard, and the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC). While the BEES applies only to issues under AHFC purview, we also took note of the process undertaken by ASHBA to consider a statewide building code, in particular the fact that that group had determined to use the International Residential Code as the basis for their work.
After the above review, and considering the recurrent complaint that BEES was not written in "code language," the work group decided to restate BEES in terms of the IECC 2006 and to include the new ASHRAE 62.2-2004 residential ventilation standard as part of that code for Alaska. We recognized that there would be several aspects of both the IECC 2006 and ASHRAE 62.2-2004 that would not work in Alaska so we proposed that there would have to be a set of Alaska-specific amendments to both that would need to be adopted by the AHFC Board along with the regulatory actions to redefine BEES.
In working on these amendments, we generally tried to follow the IECC standards and to not make any radical departures from the standards that had been set in the old BEES. We did have to compromise somewhat to fit the two together, and we had to extend the IECC climate zones to fit the range of conditions in Alaska. Recognizing the increased costs of energy, we dropped the special natural gas zone (2G) in the Anchorage area and we proposed an increase in the minimum R-values for windows and skylights. The process for the performance compliance path (energy rating) was unchanged.
The changes adopted by the AHFC Board are: AHFC BEES Regulations, and Alaska Amendments to IECC 2006 and ASHRAE 62.2-2004. Note that the amendments are intended to be read along with the documents that they amend; namely, the International Energy Code 2006 and the ASHRAE Standard 62.2-2004 Ventilations and Acceptable Indoor Air Quality in Low-rise Residential Buildings. While the proposed changes were presented at many different meetings around the state over the past 12 months, it is natural that busy folks didn't take the time to carefully review these changes until after the AHFC Board adopted them. There are several groups now taking a detailed look at the changes. We will consider their concerns and will recommend additional changes to the AHFC Board.
Wood-burning Technology: (3/07)
This project is funded by the Fairbanks North Star Borough. As a first step toward developing practical wood energy solutions for urban and rural Alaska, we have hired a wood energy specialist, Dave Misiuk (see bio under staff), to work with us in researching, developing and testing a variety of wood-burning technologies and products that could be the basis for local enterprises. We anticipate that the first year of this project will be spent evaluating promising technologies and will culminate in a report and project plan for the second year. The report will detail the advantages and disadvantages of the various technologies investigated. The project plan will specify which technologies are the most promising and a program for testing and demonstrating these promising technologies over the second year of the project.
Click for more information.
This AHFC project was set up to finish old projects that just need editing work in order to have a final report and close out the project. It is also designed to support production of a new class of reports that we are calling snapshots (see Reports). These short reports are meant to allow timely communication of results from ongoing projects or small research efforts that are not funded as a full blown research project, but which have interesting results nevertheless. This project will also support the creation of best practice brochures and videos from one or more projects and the maintenance of our web site.
Hybrid Micro Energy Project: (11/07) Live Data
The CCHRC initiated the Hybrid Micro-Energy Project (HMEP) to demonstrate how a variety of renewable energy sources can work together to power small scale energy demands in Alaska on a year round basis. The hybrid system is designed for the high-latitude challenge of minimal solar energy during the long winter when energy demand is greatest and bountiful solar energy in the summer when demand is minimal.
The HMEP will consist of 10 to 15 kilowatts of solar photovoltaic tracking solar arrays, two different types of solar hot water collectors, and at least one biomass fired combined heat and power (CHP) unit, all of which will work together to provide heat and power to the Research Test Facility on a year round basis. HMEP research will also include off-site monitoring of wind power generation.
Contributors to the HMEP include the BP Foundation, the Fairbanks North Star Borough, the State of Alaska, Siemens, GW Scientific, Remote Power Incorporated, University of Alaska Fairbanks, EEInternet, the Cooperative Extension Service, and Golden Valley Electric Association.
The HMEP will greatly contribute to CCHRC’s goal of a net zero energy Research and Testing Facility.
The HMEP system operations data will be available through the internet to enable the monitoring of its performance in real time. Check back soon for a link to HMEP data. Click for more information
Sustainable Northern Shelter Project: (04/08)
The Sustainable Northern Shelter Project was developed to address the needs of sustainable rural housing for northern climates. The design of the project incorporates many sustainable aspects that will benefit Northern communities by demonstrating a culturally designed, affordable, replicable and simply constructed home that uses very little water or energy. The project will begin spring of 2008 and develop over the next two year. Update 4/9/08: The details have been updated. Click here for additional details.
Alaska Energy Efficiency Program and Policy Recommendations
Alaska residents see the cost of energy as a major issue. As utility bills skyrocket, this issue escalates, affecting homeowners, renters, businesses and industry. Legislators are concerned and looking for the best strategy to provide some form of relief to residents. Recognizing the need to take action, the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation (AHFC) and the Alaska Energy Authority (AEA) asked the Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC) to sponsor a comprehensive review and analysis of the energy efficiency policies and programs in the State of Alaska. CCHRC contracted in December 2007 with Information Insights and its subcontractor, the Rocky Mountain Institute, for this study. The review focuses on programs that address end-use energy consumption in space heating and electrical needs of residential and commercial users. Although the funders recognize the dire energy situation in rural Alaska, primary emphasis of this report is on Railbelt communities, recognizing that there is an existing rural energy plan.1 The study is not intended to address transportation or industrial energy efficiency opportunities. The interim report, IR 2008-01, State of Alaska Energy Efficiency Policy Interim Recommendations, and the appendices, IR 2008-02, State of Alaska Energy Efficiency Policy Interim Appendices are available on our reports page. The final report is due in early June, 2008.