A Breath of Fresh Air

How comfortable are you right now? This isn’t a question about your chair — it’s about your air.

According to Grahame Maisey, the HVAC systems in most buildings are not designed to maximize the comfort of occupants. They are also, he says, wasteful — even those billed as “energy efficient” — and hard to maintain. Maisey, an engineer who runs a Pennsylvania-based consultancy with his wife, Beverly Milestone, a writer and educator, is on a mission to change this state of affairs.

The problem, he says, begins early in the design process. The owner’s needs and wants over the long term, and the basis for those needs and wants, are rarely examined in detail. Decisions about mechanical systems — which account for a large share of construction costs and energy use, as well as occupant complaints — are made arbitrarily and without transparency and documentation is rarely comprehensible to everyone with a stake in the project.

Without detailed analysis or integration into broader design objectives, oversized, hard-to-maintain systems are mindlessly specified and installed. Lifecycle costs, including operating costs, and the strong correlation of occupants’ comfort and performance with a company’s profitability, are given short shrift. The commissioning process, theoretically established to deliver the best design to the owner, instead has become a redundant exercise that validates a one-size-fits-all approach. That approach, says Maisey, is essentially a lot of hot (and cold) air blowing around. Mechanical systems are installed to promote the thermal comfort of occupants, but their focus is almost always on air control with no regard for the essential variables of humidity and ventilation.

It’s tempting to ask, in the face of Maisey’s grim state of play, can it really be this bad? But to many of us shivering in the room during his presentation at the DBIA annual conference in November, his words rang true. The air conditioning was so intense, despite the chilly outdoor temperatures, that many of us donned our coats and scarves. Who hasn’t brought an extra sweater, blanket, space heater or fan to the frosty or sweltering office? How many stories have you heard or read about the poor energy performance of many ostensibly efficient LEED buildings? In an era of tight budgets, rising energy costs and mounting data on the impact of climate change, Maisey’s message is timely and urgent.

Maisey was born and raised in the United Kingdom, where energy conservation has been a priority since World War II. As a teenager, he worked for a meticulous chief engineer at an air conditioning company focused on rooms housing massive but delicate computer equipment. After earning degrees in mechanical engineering and environmental science, he worked for a couple of large design-build firms in London and then the National Industrial Fuel Efficiency Service. “It’s science, but also an art form,” he says. “That’s what I enjoy about this work.”

During the 1970s energy crisis, Maisey’s work took him across the Atlantic, where conservation was already acquiring a bad name among building owners. He found — and environmentalist Amory Lovins later documented in a 1988 report — that new HVAC systems, including those used in hospitals and schools, cost more, required more maintenance and left occupants less comfortable. Seeing a market for his expertise in designing sustainable, high-performance systems, he took on more projects and, drawn in part by the excellent trout fishing in the region, settled in the Delaware Valley, where his firm, Building Services Consultants, remains today.

Maisey’s goal is to help design long-lived, high-performance, adaptable buildings. His approach has two parts: Energy master planning and total quality commissioning. The energy master plan is geared toward the building’s long-term use, looking out at least 25 years and anticipating potential changes in use (such as a possible change from open plan to discrete offices). The plan is ideally developed during a planning charrette involving the owner, the principals of the design-build team and, crucially, members of the facility management and maintenance teams.

It’s the designers’ responsibility to help the owner define his or her objectives: how efficient should the building be? What kind of resources will be available for maintenance? What is the desired lifespan of the building? “If you press for details,” says Maisey, “you’ll get the spec.” This process in turn informs the design charrette, which refines the project objectives and explores strategies to achieve them in a manner that does not unduly constrain flexibility in usage over the longer term.

Total quality commissioning ensures that the recommended approach will satisfy the owner’s performance objectives throughout the building’s lifecycle. Maisey advocates using tools such as BIM and energy performance simulation; he says the design calculations commonly used to size HVAC systems ignore efficiency at more realistic low- and partial-load situations. Instead, calculations focus on maximum loads and minimum code requirements. The result is oversized, expensive systems.

Ideally, computer-based simulations should be combined with expert analysis and careful, plain-language documentation of a detailed design intent developed in tandem with the design itself. This document tracks the decisionmaking process and the reasoning behind agreed-upon strategies as well as options that are considered and rejected.

Maisey says his customized, project-specific, analytical approach actually saves money by producing more energy efficient, adaptable buildings that last a long time, are easy to maintain and foster occupants’ comfort and increased productivity. And while his rapid-fire, acronym-laden speech clearly marks him as an engineer, a lot of his ideas, though technologically complex, boil down to simple common sense. Consider the following tips:

• Don’t sequester equipment away in the ceiling or other inaccessible places. If it’s not easy to maintain, it won’t be maintained.
• Work with natural systems to minimize fossil fuel energy use. For example, very cold days are almost always very sunny as well — design the building to use this solar energy.
• When the forecast predicts a very hot or cold day, pre-cool or -heat the building overnight when less energy is required to reach optimal temperatures.

Maisey’s methodology isn’t widespread yet — there are no textbooks on energy master plans and total quality commissioning as he envisages these processes. And, as he says, “Nobody ever got sued for installing too big a boiler or chiller.” So he remains something of an outlier or, as he cheerfully describes himself, a radical, determined to meet the challenge of climate change head-on. The recent craze for LEED certification has not helped Maisey’s cause — he sees the program as devoid of proper analysis and overly reliant on charts with boxes to check off.

The situation will only change, he says, when owners demand better buildings. Maisey’s clients are satisfied, but they are not evangelists; they quietly enjoy their advantage over less efficient and productive competitors. But that doesn’t worry him. A lack of repeat customers is a testimony to his success and he does have a waiting list for his services.