In an article on the Sustainable Plant website, Bill Holmes, P.E. described an chilling experience during a recent energy conservation project at a hospital. While dealing with the problem of an open fire door, he discovered that during initial construction, the openings of 250 to 300 pipe sleeves had been left unsealed — so that fumes from the boiler room could travel through the entire hospital.
"This disaster waiting to happen had been there for more than 20 years," Holmes wrote. "Fumes from an explosion or fire in the boiler house would have been immediately sucked throughout the hospital and could have killed or seriously injured a lot of people. How could this be possible?"
Holmes said this discovery, while, frightening, was not unusual.
"For nearly 40 years I have worked in the field with existing energy systems in existing buildings and have regularly encountered wrong designs, wrong equipment, wrong sizes, wrong control, wrong operation and wrong maintenance – people problems."
Holmes founded Holmes Energy LLC and developed the AutoPilot Monitoring-Based Commissioning (MBCx) System in 1979. He has a B.S. and M.S. in mechanical engineering and has done additional coursework and research for his PhD. He is a former Purdue professor and taught for several years in the Continuing Education in Energy Management Program at the University of Wisconsin.
Holmes said his model is the airline industry and that by employing the same standards, training and quality control methods, buildings have the potential to work as well as airplanes.
Read the article.
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