(upbeat music) ♪ - Hi, I'm Paul Kriescher Welcome to "Heart of a Building."

Did you know that buildings account for about 40% of all energy use in the United States?

We're hoping to make a dent in that percentage.

This show dives into building designs that are cutting edge really pushing the envelope of energy efficiency and sustainable living.

Along the way, we'll also explore the motivation from the people involved in these great projects.

In short, the why.

Today we're in beautiful Costilla County, Colorado and the San Louis Valley nestled in the shadow of Blanca Peak, and south of the Great Sand Dunes National Park.

Sierra Grande School District serves around 300 students, pre-K through 12th.

From the towns of Blanca and nearby Fort Garland, all in this one building.

And this building is designed and built with sustainability and function in mind.

The new Sierra Grande School was recently completed, and we get to go take a look.

(soft music) School district first began planning the construction of this new facility.

They reached out to the community to find out what they were hoping would be incorporated.

Let's talk to some of the people who were tasked with turning their feedback into this building that would check some of the boxes for years to come.

Now, I'm here with two of the influential school board members that brought this project to reality.

So you went to school in the old school building, correct?

So, as I understand it, it's night and day different.

- That is correct.

I graduated from Sierra Grande in the '90s.

Don't wanna age myself, but there it is.

And I've got three children that have gone K, well not K-12, but gone through the school system here.

And I've got a daughter that's a senior right now.

- My grandpa actually graduated from this school, and my dad did as well.

My brothers and sisters did.

So we have a few generations that are here, so it's really awesome to be able to say that and that I've been part of this community for a really long time.

And it's really cool to have got to experience both schools.

- Tyler - Just kind of like what she said, my great-grandparents came here, and then my grandpa, and his siblings, and then my mom and dad.

And it is just cool to see all the advances and to be able to be here and see all the transitions.

And it's awesome.

- Both of you were very much involved in this, and I've heard enough of the background that the community needed a little persuasion to understand that this was wise, instead of just continuing to invest money and band-aiding the old building - I was on the board, of course then in 2016 when this came up in the summer, and we started talking about the forecast of what the upcoming years look like in regards to renovations.

We had some pretty big challenges that we were gonna have to look at.

At that point in time, it was determined that we were gonna proceed with at least a master plan to try to apply for a BEST Grant.

(soft music) - With our older facility, it was made up of a structure with a lot of add-ons to it.

And we had an old boiler system run by propane.

I know of at least twice in the history of that, that it caught fire.

We had a lot of inefficiencies, high energy costs, and it was getting worse.

- A renovation, putting a band-aid and more band-aids on was within $5 million of building a new facility.

And so at that point in time, we really felt like we needed to just proceed towards a new facility.

And that continued that process in regards to us applying and turning in our first BEST Grant application in the spring of 2018.

And we were then denied.

And so we knew that we would have one more opportunity realistically, to try to apply one more time.

It was recommended that we go and get on our next election to pass a bond.

But then the spring fire hit (soft music) When we had that huge loss and impact to our community, at that time, we were really second guessing whether or not we would be able to pull off, taking the bond to that election.

And so we did put a committee together and really let our community know why we were proceeding with building a new school and what we were wanting to accomplish for our community, for our kids.

- We had a lot of parents that were actively involved in trying to get the process going.

We did have obviously a few that were a little opposed to it.

- We were pretty attached to that old building.

I feel like, I think the community as a whole was.

- We had a lot of meetings for a couple years and still have a lot of meetings, but it was great to see the community involvement.

They're pretty adamant about what they wanted.

- We were successful in passing that bond, but, as you know, it was by very slight margin.

- Yeah.

Less than 1%.

- Yes.

- Very slim margin of voters.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- But that passing of that bond was instrumental in us going back in 2019 to the BEST Board and having a successful and an approved application.

And of course, here we are today.

- Here we are today.

- The board was very strategic in ensuring that from this step forward, we were gonna provide, number one, a good quality facility for the next many decades to come.

But number two, it had the capabilities to be sustainable.

And what I mean by that is today, we're on grid today, but we have the capability that if we want to, as a board down the road to pursue sustainable sources of energy like solar or wind, we've got the facility to be able to plug into those kind of things, and to be able to achieve net zero in some capacity in the future.

- I'm dressed in fully insulated clothes.

What does this have to do with Sierra Grande School?

Find out at the end of the episode.

(soft music) So now I'm very pleased to be spending time with two integral designers of this great project.

If it wasn't for your team, really, I don't know if this project would be what it is.

You were very integral in making sure that the community came together, understood the vision for doing something beyond code, and helping them understand how to get there.

- We got to join the journey midstream, honestly.

Because the school had to go through a process of evaluating their existing facilities and determining what to do.

And there was that chance for them to think about what did they as a community really want and need, and what might this new school celebrate for them?

And it's the views, it's a place for community to gather and celebrate the work of the students and what the students are learning.

- Typically, as designers approach high performance buildings, there's an inherent tendency to make the systems more complicated.

That has been how a lot of design teams have approached high performance that is low energy use.

And that becomes a real challenge when you're in a location like the San Luis Valley where you've got maybe a four hour drive to get back to Denver to get high tech help to come out to these buildings and maintain them.

So not just the buildings we've worked on, but other buildings that have been built to the BEST program here in this vicinity have frankly struggled with the maintenance side.

And what we came up with very early in the process, in fact you took it to the interview as a concept already, was something we pitched to this client, which is a concept we call passive house.

That is investing more of the budget, more of the design effort and energy into making the envelope all the surrounding of the building, the roof, the walls, the windows, even the foundation underneath, making those much better insulated than a typical building.

And when we have an envelope that is that high quality, it lets our mechanical and electrical engineer partners do something great.

It lets them minimize and simplify the systems that keep the building heated, cooled, ventilated, and lighted.

- The building envelope is gonna live with the building for 50, 60, 70, 80, 100 years.

Where mechanical systems, electrical systems needs to be upgraded every 10, 15, 20 years.

So we always want to put our effort and money into that building envelope.

Second thing is, when you do the building envelope you put extra money into the building envelope, you can reduce the mechanical system size by one third or one fourth.

- If I look at a recent high-performing school building of ours, any number of them, and the same thing for our peers and competitors in the industry, we have certain minimum or typical R values, insulation values we try to achieve for all those components that I mentioned earlier.

If we look at this building on average, we have doubled all of those values.

So for example, if we look at the roof, we've gone from R35 to R50.

If we look at the walls, we've gone from R27 to R49.

If we look at the windows, we've gone from R2 to R6 or seven.

If we look at the floor all the way below us, something where we normally have no insulation at all, we actually have an R value of 6.5.

So this building is- - And R value of 6.5- - Where normally there was zero.

- Zero, right.

Yeah.

- So this building, that's what I say on average, it's about twice the insulation of a typical building.

And that's what enables our mechanical and electro engineer colleagues to completely rethink their approach to how to keep this building comfortable inside.

(soft music) - The unit behind us actually has a heat wheel in it, that is used for ventilation purposes but it takes heat out of the air in the building through a heat exchanger before exhausting out the air and bringing in otherwise cold air, it warms it up.

Then it has an air source heat pump, a high efficiency air source heat pump to actually heat or cool, depending on the time of year that's there in those last resort, there's electric resistance heat.

But it's really cool technologies.

- I think we're all familiar with electric heat and gas furnace.

And so the efficiency of a gas furnace is about 80% electric heat is a 100%.

A heat wheel is about a hundred times electric heat.

- So it's a hundred times more efficient.

- Yes.

- Okay.

- Yes.

because you're basically just extracting heat, you're transferring heat.

So on a project like this we're recovering what's equivalent to about eight furnaces with this heat wheel.

So eight home furnaces.

- Many of you at home probably have an evaporative cooler, some people call it a swamp cooler here in Colorado and across the west, what you've done here is really very cool.

- So evaporative cooling, we all actually have it.

It's called sweat, and that cools us off.

And so what we do with this process is we actually run water over media.

It evaporates the water and cools the air.

So we have a heat transfer going on, and in our climate we can get 60 degree air, which in this area where it's not very warm will give you cooling year round.

- Yeah, which is absolutely outstanding on that side- - For a fraction of the energy of a compressor.

- Yeah - So if you were to do an economic analysis and say, look at some inexpensive equipment that maybe lasts 15 years or some really good stuff that lasts 30 to 40, but saves a lot of energy, and then you don't have to rebuild it and throw the old piece away, from a material standpoint it's better to reuse something than put something new.

So school district doesn't have to come up with that capital cost in 15 years that they struggle to get.

- The way we measure energy in buildings is with BTUs, which is a unit of energy.

- British thermal unit.

- Yep.

And then- - One matchstick applies to eight (indistinct) - And EUI is the energy use intensity.

So the lower the EUI, the more efficient.

- Excellent.

- Similar to miles per gallon in a car.

There are different classes of cars.

So you wouldn't compare a pickup truck to a sedan and compare those miles per gallons.

Similarly, in buildings we have different classes of building type.

So we measure schools against other schools.

If we measured schools against hospitals that would look very different.

The state of Colorado actually did an assessment of all school facilities across the entire state about 11 years ago and discovered that the average EUI in our school buildings was 80, which is considerably high.

A new school should be more around 50 or 60.

This school is predicted to perform around 20KBTUs per square foot.

- I think the... A quarter, yeah.

I think the actual number is gonna be closer to 30, 25 to 30, but still about half of what a conventional school should be performing as.

You'll hear a lot of green building professionals say all electric, which is very important.

But when you actually get down to implementing an all electric project, there's a couple big barriers that we can talk about.

So first is the mechanical equipment.

So to heat and cool a building with only an electric hookup can be challenging.

Equipment is becoming cheaper and cheaper and more readily available.

Air source heat pumps are becoming more common.

So we were able to check that box off fairly early on.

The next hurdle we came to was the kitchen.

So kitchens are a huge place where natural gas is typically used.

In this particular kitchen, we were able to work with the staff to convert everything to all electric kitchen equipment.

And that takes changing the menu changing processes.

So there's a lot of adaptability and change that needs to happen with the kitchen staff and the food that they serve.

- Right.

- And then the last thing, believe it or not was actually the Bunsen burners in the science classrooms.

We had a gas hookup connected to those spaces well through design, because there really wasn't an all electric option until we found a all electric Bunsen burner out of Europe.

- Okay.

- And we were able to implement those into the spaces.

And so that was the last check box to make this school all electric.

- This buildings in a unique spot as far as geography goes.

And lack of water, Great Sand Dunes National Park nearby.

What were some of the challenges you guys faced with this unique environment building here?

- Sierra Grande here, posed some new challenges even for the valley.

The wind here in Fort Garland, Blanca is, it's something special.

There were many days, my trailer was sitting about a hundred yards out there in that parking lot.

We couldn't see this building because the sand dunes were blowing across this site.

I like to tell this story this beautiful flag out here behind us on that 75 foot pole.

When it turned and that flag started pointing towards the west, we knew something was coming.

And usually it was an absolute terrible storm with wind and rain and snow and sleet and hail and everything else.

- That sand is just such a fine dust.

It would find any little pinhole get into the building and just cause problems where you never expected it.

- Right.

- And we had towards the end of the project, our lock sets were the sand was getting into the lock sets where you couldn't get a key open the door.

So it was just you don't think about working in what we do every day.

- Right.

- That've created problems over here.

- Right.

And you mentioned the tubulars as well.

We did end up with sand inside a factory sealed compartment of those tubulars.

And we've used those tubular day lighted with powers on many projects and it wowed all of us when we were punching this thing out and how does that sand get in there?

And I'd been around long enough to know that, well it gets everywhere.

- So it was feedback to the manufacturers.

They're like, wow.

We actually- - And we came in and we sealed additional seals and we did a lot of that on our exterior doors.

We basically have double and triple gaskets and seals that we added extra after the fact because of the conditions and the environment that this school endures on a day-to-day basis.

(soft music) - So we're in the gymnasium now looking at some really cool features that have to do with day lighting and that's what your company specializes in.

So tell me a little bit about your interest in day lighting, why this matters.

Like why not just turn on the lights?

- There's two things.

One is energy savings, which really critical.

We design a space like this to have the lights off most of the day for gym classes and events like that.

But the big benefit is just we feel better in daylight.

Lots of studies show that biologically we need daylight, we need highlight levels.

Full spectrum light.

And these systems deliver that.

- That's fantastic.

So in here we've got some really cool products.

We've got tubular skylights.

Some of the viewers may have these in their home like in a dark hallway or a bathroom that doesn't have a window in it.

Commercial buildings less common but it's becoming more common to have them.

But tell me a little bit about why that's such a good way to bring in daylight.

- Yeah, it's really kind of an ingenious invention.

It has a collection system on the rooftop that has Fresnel lensing and mirrors that drive daylight deep into a building and then it pipes the light through a reflective tube and into the space.

- Nice.

- So yeah, we've been working on commercial projects almost 20 years now with this system.

Super efficient.

It's about 400% more efficient than a skylight.

Because that collection system so we don't need much roof area to collect a whole bunch of daylight.

- And there's a lot less heat loss too.

- That's right.

Like you'd have to have a much larger skylight and the lights lose a lot of heat.

They can even have condensation problems and things like that, so yeah, it's a great way to- - So for the building envelope it really saves a lot of energy because it takes very little square footage on the roof.

- In this type of project why was it so important to have highly insulated windows these high performance windows instead of off the shelf double pane windows?

'Cause these are triple pane windows.

- So the basic statistics of a good window are obviously insulating level like the R value from Home Depot.

And then you have the solar transmission.

Could be good, could be bad.

And that's why we directionally tune windows and glass to wake up in the morning and get quiet and cool in the afternoon.

- So by directionally tuning you're saying different light levels might come in on the windows on the east side which is behind us right now than on the west side?

- Light levels for sure but also heat the engineers want.... Light is not as quantified as it should be in kind of the payback analysis, but heat definitely is.

- Yeah.

- And morning sunshine here is very valuable.

But afternoon sunshine, usually we're an overhang to Utah still wouldn't knock out that three o'clock sun.

That is usually a load on the air conditioning.

So invisible coatings.

Vacuum deposited coatings.

The atomically thin Indian titanium silver, can make one window in the east morning sunshine heater and the afternoon could almost assist air conditioning with still a high visible light transmission.

- So for the wide range of people that be viewing this tell me if I'm simplifying correctly but with all that film, referring to it as a low e-film is at least a starting point, correct?

- Exactly.

Emissivity kind of looks like reflectivity, but if you look at a thermos bottle, the silver on the outside that's a low emissivity coating.

It's not really reflecting the heat into the coffee.

It's refusing to broadcast or emit or get rid of it.

So low emissivity, which is atomically thin silver keeps heat because it refuses to get rid of it during construction.

For a lot of people, they may not know this but building a building like this how do you have water for everything from washing hands to cleaning things off, to testing, plumbing and the like as you're building.

So you didn't have access to water here for quite some time.

So what challenges did that pose for you?

- It was a pretty big challenge.

I mean, we were, we tested the entire plumbing system out of a water truck.

Drove into town, filled it up, we had a garden hose that we could pull off the old school to fill a water truck to fill the system, but most of it was basically a garden hose is what we had until the very end.

- And there's a well here, but there's also there's just not simply enough water in this location.

- Yeah.

The existing school, their well was set up to pull 50 gallons per minute.

- Okay.

- So they were legally allowed to pull.

- Yeah.

They ran a whole school off of that.

So yeah, we had to drill a new well, put in a new pump storage tank just really to feed the fire suppression system.

- I would say it rivals the water plants that we have encountered in town municipalities.

This school has a more enhanced water system than those towns do.

(soft music) - Whether we're talking about sandwich, exterior wall panels or we're talking about glazing in the windows we're talking about the insulation that's in the precast concrete gym walls.

All of those had to be to a higher level of performance than what is typical and what is typically bid in the marketplace.

So I think when we look at it that way, there's some unusual factors there that I hope this project is the start of creating more demand in the marketplace.

So there can be more of these materials available to do more projects like this.

I think we all wanna be good stewards we wanna be good stewards in our community.

We want our kids to understand that process of sustainability and good stewardship.

And that's where we're moving towards.

I mean, I think we all need to be a part of that.

And I thought it was really important for our school to highlight and showcase that.

- I feel like even our community has always felt like it's been 10 or so years behind and it doesn't feel that way here anymore.

And that's really awesome.

And- - Hey, we got a brand new school too.

And so that's definitely awesome.

- My office is in the building and so I get to cruise around to the high school, middle school, elementary.

But just like the first time that I was here and when they were so-called recruiting me to come apply for this job, the views that I had from that cafeteria area doesn't get any better than that.

- We are small, we won't settle for anything less and we will always strive for excellence.

And I think that speaks to the heart of our building and what you see here today as well, we're a small district but this is the type of facility you'll see in urban areas in some of the most progressive areas in the state and in the country.

- Knowing all the resources that this school has to offer to not only give good education, but it's really at the heart of two communities, I feel like I was raised not only by my parents, but by the community of this school.

And I hope for my kids' experience that too someday.

- Sierra Grande's thermal envelope, the insulation air tightness windows and doors was designed and built as you've seen, to be very much like how I was dressed at the beginning of the episode.

Most buildings that are designed to merely meet the energy code and too often aren't even built that well, are more like having a thermal envelope which performs the way I'm dressed now with only partial winter wear.

Which one would you rather have?

Sierra Grande School, what a beautiful example of a group coming together, carefully considering the best ways to build a functional, sustainable facility using practical equipment designed to work specifically for this community.

Providing an exceptional learning environment that greatly reduces utility bills and maintenance costs while giving back to future generations.

It takes everyone from the designers and engineers for having telescopic vision for the future.

To the community, embracing a vision that isn't just short-term, but looking out for their generations yet to come.

To the contractors for being so open to learning how to build in such a unique environment to make this vision a reality.

It was a pleasure talking with the champions of this project.

The execution of these innovative ideas have proven to me this type of building is ready for mainstream application.

And I hope other school districts across Colorado and all across the US apply these ideas to all new and renovated school buildings.

Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) ♪ - I'm gonna do a clap in front of your face, Robert.

So just don't mind this.

It's old fashioned like the clickers that you've seen in movies.

(clapping) ♪