Abstract Outline

This is my abstract outline if anyone has any comments about it feel free to let me know!!

Can an existing resort in Banff National Park attain LEED Gold status while incorporating feasibility and practicality? It is important to but an effort into making or national parks sustainable, it can be as small as driving fewer vehicles or as large as building net zero homes. This research topic will look at practical and feasible ways to incorporate LEED into a renovation of resort located in Banff National Park. To be more specific, the Banff Rocky Mountain Resort is in need of a few renovations and in doing so it can become one of the first LEED building in the park. LEED Canada is having a growing impact on the way we are building and designing building and this is a wonderful change. The more LEED accredited building there are the better this country will be in the long run.

There are a possible of 70 points that can be achieved on a building. To just meet the bare minimum and be LEED Certified, 26 to 32 points must be awarded. To attain Silver status 33 to 38 points must be awarded and 39 to 51 points to achieve Gold status. There is also LEED Platinum status, which is 52 to 70 points. The main purpose of LEED is to be more energy efficient and more sustainable in general.

One of the biggest energy wasters is heating and cooling. A great way to add in this department is to implement a ground source heat pump. What ground source heat pump does is it circulates water through pipes deep into the ground and then back into the building’s floor system. This will either cool the building on those hot summer days or warm the building in the cold winter months. They have been proven to be successful and have been known to save up to 40 percent with just a normal HVAC system.

The site will incorporate alternative forms of energy, such as photovoltaic panels. This will reduce the amount of power taken from the local grid. The amount of panels will be determined by the cost and availability. Other LEED points include the ability to reduce rainwater run off. By using a rain water harvesting system and apply a gravel pit in the gravel pit, it should add in the reuse of rainwater. Water efficient landscaping must also be used and captured rainwater will be used as additional irrigation. The plan will be to install low flow devices into all the plumbing fixtures. This will reduce the amount of potable water being used. Water conservation is a major issue in these types of National Parks, so it will be as water efficient of a site as possible.

These are just a few of the areas of improvements that will be done to make the resort LEED Gold Certified. However there are many other very important areas of concern that will be looked at and improved

New Research Proposal

Since I changed my topic I didn't bother updating my old research proposal. So I wrote up a quick one instead outlining my plans for this project. Hope you enjoy.

Summary Statement of Proposed Project

The Banff National Park is one of the largest tourist attractions in Western Canada. It offers great scenery, hiking, skiing, climbing, biking, and almost any outdoor activity you can think of. The Park tries very hard to stay clean and luscious to keep it as natural of a park as possible. This can be very challenging at times with the amount of people visiting the park year round. In Banff there are lots of high and low priced resorts and hotels, which use up a lot of the parks energy. So shouldn’t these resorts but a better effort to be more sustainable? The Banff Rocky Mountain Resort is a smaller resort located a little ways out of Banff, and it is in need of a few renovations. For my project I plan on, not only renovating it but attempting to make it a LEED Gold building, the first of its kind in the Banff Park.

The purpose of this project is to sustain some of the environmental impact on our countries wonderful National Parks. If this can be proven to be successful then maybe other hotels and resorts will follow their lead.

 The goal of this is to achieve LEED Gold Status on the resort’s entire site. The great thing about LEED is there are different certifications that can be achieved, so if Gold status is much too hard to achieve or finically doesn’t make sense then it can be conclude that LEED silver status is practical then gold. So feasibly does play a role in this project.

I aim to research how I can apply each LEED point to my site. By researching various other LEED building I plan on using similar systems to improve of heating and cooling costs as well as reduction in potable water use. By using LEED Canada guidelines I should be able to find a sufficient amount of information on each and every point. To be LEED Gold 36 to 51 points must be achieved out of a possible 70. So this does leave room for some of the more costly improvements to be ignored.

I plan on using a blog to distribute my information and new discoveries. It will be easy for others to follow a long and see how my project is going. Also later on an abstract will be created summarizing the amount of actual research that has been done.

Thesis Question

I was going through a few of new thesis questions and this is what I have come up with, what do you think?

Can an existing resort in Banff National Park attain LEED Gold status while incorporating feasibility and practicality?

Update.

So the next step for me now is to draw up a model of the renovated cabin and work on creating a site plan explaining how I will apply different LEED points.

Current Floor Plans

Here is the current layout of the one and two beroom suites. I got the images from the Banff Rocky Mountain Resort Members site. Here is the link.
http://www.banffrockymountainmembers.com/resort_info.html

New Deisgn

For my new design I will try and keep the general size and layout of of the exsiting building but try to incorporate a more sustainable design. I do want to make this a realistic project so I will be thinking about the cost and practicality of the newly deisgned buildings. On the site there are a number of connecting cabins that make up the resort. Here is a drawing of what the existing cabins look like.

Ground Source Heat Pump

I have chosen to use a ground source heat pump to Credit 1 in the Energy and Atomsphere section of the LEED points. Up to 10 points can be rewarded for this credit making it very valuable. I have drawn up a quick view of what it may look like on the exsiting lodge. I plan to make some modifications, but this should do for a quick update.