Is it February already?

I looked back at January while I was doing my expense reports and I was on the road alot. The majority of the trips were fruitful, but still it does get you tired, especially when you are trying to get rid of a cold. Next week is no exception, a trip on Monday to look at the Target Center, we are working with those folk to assist with an evaluation of the building for a "green" roof and LEED-EB, and Wednesday down to St. Peter for a Medical Office Building Project Interview. A highlight of the last few weeks and one of those road trips was a report back from the Northwest Professional Center in Sartell, MN that my revised morning warmup scheme did the trick and additional perimeter radiation will most likely not be required. The Control contractor had decided to use the average of the exterior rooms to determine the length of time the warm-up should occur, one or two of the high glass percentage rooms never got warmed up, so I had the contractor watch for minimum temperatures instead of average and that seems to have worked. (Also, not only were the rooms high glass percentage, but it looks like there is some problem with the storefront glass system allowing way too much air into the rooms which made the problem worse)


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In the last week I have been working on parts of a very large multi-use project in Wayzata Minnesota. We are in the preliminary stages, but at this time we are trying to consider a large geothermal heat pump heating and cooling system to save site energy and operating cost along with snow melting throughout the paved areas to reduce the use of salt and sand during the winter. Additionally, all storm water falling on the site at a level less than a 100 year event, will be kept on the site and not sent to the city storm system. Due to the size of the heating and cooling plant, the geothermal well field will cost in the area of $5,000,000, but should pay back in about ten years. since the project is being designed for a 100 year life, this is a pretty good payback. The high performance pieces allowed the city and developer to work towards a bit higher density and building height than would otherwise be allowed - part of trend in city planning and zones where green features are incentivised using the free market instead of mandated.

Today I'm out to the local home improvement store to pick up materials needed to install ceramic tile in our TV/game room. The room is located above our tuck-under unheated garage and has a patio door in it so during the winter it can be a cold place. We will install floor warming system with tile to make the room more usable. This room used to be a bedroom, but we installed a Murphy bed kit so we could use the room for something else unless needed for the rare guests we have. The tiling is part of our 10 year plan to hard surface every room in the house, we have the Master bed and bath along with the upstairs hall remaining after this project.