 Good afternoon Howard Wig, Code Green. Do we have an exciting topic today? What could be more exciting than existing buildings? Well for those of us who are dedicated to 100% clean electrical energy by the year 2045, we lead the nation in that respect. It's really ambitious and we have been focusing on new building construction, new homes, new office buildings. But we replace buildings at only about 1% a year. That means that in a hundred years you won't see any existing buildings. But that's a heck of a way to achieve clean energy. We need to focus on existing buildings and who better to do that. Then the Honorable Sean Mosley, Project Manager for Trinity ERD. Welcome Sean. Thank you Howard. Good to be here. Sean has been in the energy efficiency business with buildings and homes for many many years, possibly more years than you would care to admit. But your step into Trinity ERD is a fairly new step up in your career. Why don't you tell us first what Trinity ERD does and then what your specialty is here in Honolulu. Okay Trinity ERD we're a building consulting firm and we focus on basically the full building envelope is our specialty area. So that would be all the exterior cladding, the roofs, the waterproofing, above grade, below grade, fenestration. Fenestration being windows. Being windows, yes. So everything that's impacted by the exterior elements, you know, means the egress comes into play, fire systems come into play obviously because this interact with the building envelope. Our primary focus is building an envelope. And guess what? If the building is air-conditioned and you take proper proceedings on the envelope, you vastly decrease the heat gain into those buildings and the AC size can go down. And instead of running the AC at full blast, you can set it at its sweet spot and just let it pur along at a fraction of the energy use that it might use if it were cycling on and off and perhaps causing moisture conditions and so forth. Is that a good summary? Yeah, it's a good summary but you have a lot of variables. I mean you have vapor drive is a big variable and you have just interior and exterior and moisture passage. How airtight is your building? Is it too tight that it holds too much moisture? Not allowed to breathe? Is it, you know, there's different layers to get and achieve that conservation which in the newer building holds in the IBC 2006, which we're currently under 2012, up for consideration in the IECC, which is mandating a lot of the chain as well. If you're putting a brand new building up, you have a lot more freedoms, if you will, to use different testing components that are more compliant to those requirements. If you're working on existing buildings, which I do a fair amount of, the whole different game. An existing building already is an existing structure that can handle so much weight. Like a roof, for example, you look at our 39 insulation or whatever it's required for an attic space. Well, if it's an existing attic and it's hollow, that's really not that much weight. But if you're looking at a building that has a rooftop walkable deck that was designed to handle only so much weight load and now you want to make your energy efficient to the code requirements, you know, structurally maybe exceeding the ability of that roof and it's a walkable deck to be able to be brought up to energy code and it becomes a life safety concern. So now what do you do? Because the code official is going to say, well, here's the IECC and you have to have R20 on the top of a deck, okay, but you can't walk on that because it's, you know, not meant for regular foot traffic. But this was my rooftop deck that I've had for 30 years. You're telling me I can't use it for what I bought it for? So you come into some careful dances and, you know, with the IECC, the 2018, which is a recently been brought up into discussion because there was a chapter in the 2006 and the 2012 IECC, which chapter 34 basically disappeared in the 2012 writing. So now that it's gone, you have no existing building code in the IECC. We really make judgment calls with, okay, structural analysis, what's required and just saying refer to the IECC won't work because structural requirements are for new construction, things that can be easily adhered to versus something that's 50 or 80 years old. So the types of problems that you are building up have been literally building up, building up until the International Codes Council decided to totally update the International existing building code and address the type of issues that you are bringing up. Yeah, what was fascinating was in the early stages of the 2006 adoption, I was, you know, it was my pleasure to work with the IECC subcommittees on the fenestration and the Windborne Debris region requirements to look at what should be a hurricane window, what should not. Miles per hour did a lot of work with Gary Chalk and Martin Chalk and all those. And with the local builders that say we can't afford to build this is too expensive because of parts. So that, what that took a couple years or so I think before. Easy. Before stuff kind of came to light that made sense. And there was a whole lot of amendments that had to be written, including I believe you worked on a tropical zone to help alleviate some of the challenges that we have in Hawaii that other nations or parts of the nation don't have because unless you're put in Maui or Mauna Kea, you're not getting snow per se. But a lot of the codes in IBC are written for seismic load and for snow loads and those things as well. So as a designer, I saw this lot actually prior to Trinity. I was in work with Breezeway for seven years working on fenestration and passive air and whatnot. And designers wanted to achieve all the benefits of Hawaii without having to build an igloo because they didn't really need an igloo at the beach. So that's where you get into all these different challenges. And it was fun watching some of the new coq aqua buildings go up and how they worked on the building envelope. There's always been challenges with some of those buildings and they're brand new, you know, and they're already, you know, due for repair and just got their building turned over for occupancy. So I always say it's not perfect yet. We might add rather expensive occupancy. They are very, very expensive. Yes, yes. You know, definitely not in the affordable housing category. Yeah. So and what we're on the coq aqua buildings. One question that I get asked frequently is the energy code supposedly restricts the fenestration area, fenestration to wall area to 40% or even 30%. Right. These coq aqua buildings look like they are 100% fenestration. You know, we know that's not true. That's the way they look. That's that's the new, you know, building design comes and goes along just a lot like women's fashion does. Right. And the current fashion in some of those buildings are curvy, too. So yes, yes, yes. And especially the curvy ones, I think are having the greatest problem. Yeah. So that would that's where I just the the glazing and the insulated glass units, the IDU is how they're put together. What is the inner layers? Do they have a low maintenance factor or low e coating? How much solar he gained as it reflect? What time of day because actually those coatings work based on the elevation of the sun and the exposure. So you can use the same fenestration around the entire building. Only one side is really meant for extreme energy code requirements. So the other side is almost overkill and what a lot of people don't consider is what the heat is kept out is also kept in. So let's say you're a person that has a code compliant energy compliant unit, but you don't run on air conditioning. You like passive cooling. So you're going to open your awning window all the time. Now you've only got you know, 30% 20% or whatever the minimum requirement for air exchanges and for space. But meanwhile, you're living in actually a hotter apartment, as the glass is doing such a good job at keeping the heat in also. So it's a catch 22. You know, if you're going to air condition all the time, and you're going to have good air exchange, and it's not so much of a problem. But a lot of places I've been in, it'll run around AC all the time. And then there are those that they do want because a hotel or maybe it's an Airbnb that's not legal, but that's why they bought the expensive unit, you know, that's just happening. I can see with like a lot of energy code requirements where you know, you put key card in, once you take a key card out, everything turns off and shuts down. That's part of the code, by the way. Yeah. And that's all wonderful, you know, the improved LED lighting and all of that. And the, you know, for the, the egress means for, you know, fire safety for the fire chiefs and the firemen and all that's all really good and effective. But it also is effective on new construction where it's much easier to design to it. You have the right somewhat of building orientation, you know, West facing versus South and North. So how much overhang is required? How much is not required? I like to look at UH West O'ahu, which is a very well done building, because they have all the fenestration on the side where it doesn't have the worst solar heat gain. So they have this incredible view. North facing side. Yeah. So they took advantage of building orientation and whatnot, and we're able to be cold compliant, and also not have to be excessive about how they did it. But the structure is new. It was, you know, all the geotechnical survey was done so they could build a nice big facade to hold such a building and also be close to a wind borne region for hurricane. They pulled that one off. But again, that's new construction. It's not the 50, 60, 70 other buildings in Waking Keep. Yep. Yep. Which we need to deal with by George. Yeah. Because a lot of the people that are in the older buildings, you know, I think the typical occupancy I come across, when we're asked as a firm we go in, besides doing building an envelope and repair and design, we do it for both new construction and that existing. We're asked to do assessments of properties. You know, people say, Hey, our building is 30 years old. We don't need, we need to know where the maintenance is negligent. What might have to change soon? Part of you. So we go through and do the assessment of the whole thing. Sometimes there's a capital reserve study and say, here you go for the next 30 years, here's kind of the expenses that you're looking at. And one of the interesting parts is, when you do that, you have to look at compliance to code. Yeah. And how's it's going to come up? I mean, some people say, well, if it's not there as it was built, then, well, you got no problem. Well, no, not true. Because once you want to change your roof, for example, and you're going to tear it off, you now have to be compliant under the IBC. Yeah, or in the IECC, the energy code is as well. And there's nowhere that it's relaxed. And the ways that the way the permitting works right now, the local DPP, I mean, they want to see your drawings and your intensive design for initial review, or you send it to third party review. And either way, you've invested a lot of time and energy, or approval, when you don't even know if you're going to get it. So when you went into the 2006 and the 2012 IBC, it has that chapter 34, which talks about existing buildings. But all those areas they're afraid to discuss, get referred back to the IBC and then they require the local city and counties to amend appropriately. When we have what I know, 35 pages of amendments are here in their schedule, something like that, right? So one of the challenges I face within the work that I do with our firm is, okay, these people need a new roof. All right, how are you going to give them a new roof? Yeah, it seems easy enough to get a bid, put a new roof on. But is that new roof going to be safe? That's a good question. You know, is the people that are four stories below, are they going to realize all the benefits of insulating a concrete roof on the first floor? Likely not. It's only the fourth floor occupant. So now you're saying, okay, I got to put this new roof on. And only the fourth floor occupant is likely going to benefit because the bottom three floors are all passively cooled. Great. So they'll have this really wonderful roof, but they might not be able to go on it safely with more than two or their friends or four of their friends. Because it's too much dead load. You can't make it into a major roof garden type thing. No, because it wasn't the intent or the design of the building at that time. You know, so that's some of the barricades that are coming up because if you want to make the roof compliant for the dead load and the live load which turns into your ultimate strength, you have to reinforce it structurally. And I admit it, you say that I'm dollar signs are going off in my head. Yeah. And the way to reinforce it right in the middle of their bedroom? Yeah, a nice person in the bedroom. Yeah. I mean, I heard a son of the cockocco buildings, you got columns in the middle of your rooms. I guess that's one way to do it. But that's not really feasible. So what happens is people defer the work or they don't get permits on the work. And they hire in Joe pick up to come in and just do patches and repairs and then and what happens two, three, four, five years down the road? Well, not sure. No, we need to take a very brief break. Code green Howard Wig shot Mosley back in a moment. Aloha. This is Winston Welch. 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We'd be grateful if you go to thinktechawai.com and make a donation to support us now. Mahalo. Good afternoon again, Howard Wig, Code Green here with Sean Mosley talking about existing buildings and the more Sean talks, the more complex and potentially expensive bringing green building, bringing existing buildings up to code sounds. This is no easy chore. So Sean, welcome back and why don't we go to the first slide here and see what's going on there. So recently Craig Stevenson from the IECC came to Honolulu to do a presentation for the Building Code Council reviewing the different options and the IEBC was not heavily considered up until recently when the chapter 34 has been taken away from it. Now let's define IEBC again. So International Existing Building Code. So just a few different slides that were random that were that I picked out of his presentation with their approval. Just so you know, so exceptions allow alterations to be done under the code adopted at the time of original construction. The building or portion of the building subject to the approval of the code official. This is really critical because if you're trying to get energy compliant or you're trying to improve a roof structure or repair a wall that's falling apart, you know, if you're using the IEBC the structure requirements. The International Building Code may exceed the ability of what you can do to that building which is why the code at the time of adoption will now be referenced and they say okay well we got to consider it was meant for this structural design pressure and this much wind loading and this is all we have to work with but how can we reinforce it better. So that's a really fascinating aspect of the IEBC which is not referenced in the IEBC. And it puts a lot of pressure doesn't it? Judgmental pressure? It puts a ton on the building department and which is that if you pull up the next slide if you don't mind sir it talks about powers of the code official. Now we've always known with the IEBC they have the final say to determine stuff but this basically mandates that they make sure that the permit meets certain requirements so it's actually going to put more time on their review of your application but what's a nice aspect of it because of what's happening with their requirements is you can ask for a meeting before you get into major design and say hey we've got this old building it's not historical yet needs a new roof and we talk about how we can accomplish this get closest to our energy requirements but still have it be safe and still have means of egress and life compliance and all that in place for that. So that was a real big one that I know will be heavily discussed amongst subcommittees looking after the adoption of the IEBC. And might be a really good example of that being that the windows were since the 1995 buildings windows were in code compliance back then but we know there's a little thing called climate change and we know that the hurricanes looks like they may not hit us this season they're gonna hit us and hurricanes are inevitable it's just time and so how about this safety aspect you need to put a film on the windows to make the hurricane resistant there's a lot of ways around it in the IEBC everybody would be told just put in her pain glass so on the first seven stories it's large missile impact glass so it's very thick and it's extremely heavy I forget the exact pounds per square foot but it's very very heavy it takes a few people and you go seven stories above you can go to small missiles it's lighter so that way if you have wind-borne debris the small missiles usually meant for like aggregate roofs where it's all flying off the top and swirling around the building causes damage to the glass but if the building and I'm actually looking under the property with this very scenario if the building is 40 years old and it's only got a four or five inch concrete slab holding it up and now you're going to throw for lack of a better term an 800 pound window system on the one that was there before was 150 and you're going to do that up 40 stories you're going to have some issues yeah and how do you reinforce that now you're relying on the structure of the window to be the structural element through the whole building you can't do that it has to be somewhat independent and be you know like containing itself within that opening so the catch 22 or the workaround was okay well there are internal films that you can get through local manufacturers where it gives you the impact requirements and there is glazing that's a double glaze that's not as heavy where you can get the energy requirements man so you can you can still work within it without having to go heavy commercial new construction style of building and and probably doubtlessly save a ton of money that way too on the window film is not all that expensive and there are very very skilled guys who can put that film on fairly quickly yeah well absolutely I mean you look at a regular sliding door it might cost you 1200 bucks for a panel that doesn't move and one that does it's you know six foot eight high you take that same one and you put hurricane impact glass and it's about five thousand dollars so now you have you know grandma and grandpa lived in their property for 35 years and their doors are broken and they need a new door but they lived on a fixed retirement and you're gonna tell them okay it's gonna cost you 10 grand after installation to put just that door in it gives kind of allergy and nobody wants to put that type of burden on grandma and grandpa and we have so many examples of that in in Hawaii right you know people got their home 40 50 years ago when it was affordable they've lived there they've raised their kids they now have their grandkids this is a wonderful home they've got fixed income yeah now unfortunately there's always that maintenance factor where you go into buildings and they just didn't take care of the stuff so it needs to be fixed but there are ways to make it safer and more compliant yeah without trying to pretend to be the international building called standard only and that's where the IABC comes in that's where the discretion comes in yeah we've got a couple more slides why don't we bring up the next one here okay so primary requirements basically some of the requirements that hasn't changed too much you have to detail your fire protection your means of egress your exterior wall envelope the balconies walking services and the site plan so that's a pretty standard thing there but what has changed is the framing members of the roof and the systems that you have to consider and explain out so now if you're working on an existing building that no longer has structural drawings because it's 35 or 40 years old but my house is 50 something years old so do you have the original drawings or do you have to tear parts of the wall out to figure out how it was really built inside yeah you see so that's where the court officials determination what you know is the built condition so that's where more destructive investigation comes into play where you take a component of the building that is not going to affect the overall area it's okay this is how it's made and then you can do the calculations because unfortunately you know a lot of the DPP drawings got put in the microfiche DPP meaning the departmental building yeah so you can pull newer drawings up online but otherwise you gotta go sit down there in microfiche and look through and hope that the architect or the contractor at the time finish the as-built drawings with any modifications and changes to say this is what your building's made like and then maybe so far in the last year I've gone down there I've gotten 30% lucky with finding something that gave me the information 30% yeah so that's where a lot of it comes down into a little bit of deconstructive investigation and analysis of the componentaries so that we can say okay here is a safe design most code compliant now we can have a discussion with the local building officials the structural engineers the architects and Sarah we're putting together something that is safe and yeah the key word there being safe I mean I I'm an energy code guy but certainly first and foremost I want another build a retrofitted building to be safe yeah yeah you can see everything I mean I one product I was aware of it took a year and a half building permit to come through for lights lights on the ground because of the changes in the codes so you can't put these new lights that are more energy efficient because they're missing certain listing requirement okay so for a year and a half we got to use no lights see what I mean so that's not a life safety issue yeah so that's where those little ironic things come in and people just scratch their head they're like is the the DPP department building plan is saying oh no the book says this they got to follow the book and the so the NARG attack and the engineers everyone of all have say okay well it's got to be this and then there's a back and forth and then what you're showing here I think the word that comes up for me is flexibility yeah you and you the designer and the building code official are allowed some flexibility here yeah it's working within reason of what you've already got to work with and saying well this is how we can improve it you know the lady that was here talking to us before the show she's talking about the outrigger yeah and how walls are falling apart and the sprawling is breaking them up you can fix that you can reinforce that yeah there are ways to do it you just got to know what you're doing in the right way you don't just say oh that's just I have a patch on there yeah yeah yeah that would be quite a little more work yeah I think we have one more slide coming up here so this is a big one change of occupancy this is nothing new really the IBC addresses it but in the IBC it gives a little bit more leniency for understanding what the original building was intended for and if you're changing the occupancy what you have to add to do it but in these different variations you have different levels of alterations that you work with a level one a level two and a level three which is not in the slide a level one has you know prescriptive methods so you're saying I'm going to do all these different things and it meets all the different codes by this reason a level two you're saying I'm fixing less than 50% of my building and I'm not doing anything structural to it it's just painting some of the windows out doing some new signage for you know it's going from a business to a you know housing or something nothing and we've got about 30 seconds left and number that you weren't you're going to go into level three number three is anything over 50% is basically you're really stuck to the IBC requirements you're treating it as if it were a new building you are at least that aspect of the building so I say you're going to redo the whole lighting system it must comply with the FDB lighting requirements but then you'll know if you're triggering that much requirement what you're working with before you get into it and you can have that discussion with the authority having jurisdiction saying yeah if you can meet all this then go for it if you can't yeah yeah I don't know how to tell you yeah so we're moving along here you know addressing the existing building problem and it is certainly a problem but you certainly enlightened me as to the different options that you have to bring bring existing into not just energy code compliance but the health and safety issues also yeah it'll help preserve a lot of the buildings that people don't want to lose at any at a reasonable price yeah yeah so on that very very cheery note it is time to bid fond to do once more thank you thank you you're Sean Mosley for being a very very educated and informed guest and see you next time on Code Green Hawaii