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.

Finally

After some great conversations with Mindy, we finally came up with a final topic. I am going to take a hotel in need of renovations in Banff National Park and not only renovate it but attempt to give it LEED GOLD status. Dale has provided me with a great link to give me lots of information on the LEED certification process. Here it is if any one else is interested in LEED http://www.cagbc.org/AM/PDF/LEED_Canada_NC_CS_2009_Rating_System-En-Jun2010.pdf

Update

Good Day Fellow Bloggers!!!
I have a few updates, my topic may be getting a bit of fine tuning. I am thinking about changing the main aspect of my research. Instead of doing a heat transfer system system I am planning on seeing if i can treat an NHL style hockey rink with LEED PLATINUM status.

Hope it goes well

Research Proposal

Back Again With Another Quick Word



Summary Statement of Proposed Project

Ever since the day hockey was first played on a frozen pond, Canadians have had an undeniable passion for the sport. Even today you can still find people out in freezing cold weather playing on those same natural ice surfaces as generations before them. However in today’s excessive world those frozen ponds just are not good enough for the high demand of the sport. An indoor hockey arena can be found in almost every community in Canada. New facilities are being built for millions of dollars with highly demanding cooling systems to keep the ice at the optimal performance. Imagine if all the heat produced from these cooling systems could be used to heat nearby building, practically high-rise residential building. In Edmonton, Alberta there is a demand for a new downtown hockey arena with adjacent residencies for the nearby Grant MacEwan University. The city of Edmonton could also use a shopping center in at the same location. The location of the site has already been picked out and it has great potential for a state of the art facility. It also has the potential to be a leader in environmentally friendly hockey arenas. In a country with so much energy put into these hockey facilities it would be nice to see a change in the way we look at designing them.

Purpose

The purpose of this topic is to better develop more energy efficient hockey arenas in Canada, by using the heat generated from the cooling systems to heat a residential building. There are approximately 2486 arenas in Canada (Hockey Canada, 2005, p3), and each produce an average of 1,500,000 kWh of energy per year (Nichols, 2009, p16). Rexall Place, the current home of the Edmonton Oilers, consumes around 8,750,000 kWh of power annually. An even more staggering statistic is on game day the arena will use 35,000 kWh of power on just that single day (Hanak, Wilson, Herman, Becher, 2007, p31). That is about three times as much power as a residential home will use in a full year. With that much energy being put into these large scale arenas there is going to be wasted heat from the cooling systems, which can be used for the residences and adjacent building. It has been proven to be possible, hockey rinks have been built before with pools in the same facility using the heat from the arena to heat the water in the pool. These facilities have proven to be successful, so instead of heating pools the plan is to heat building.

Goals of the Project

For this project I plan find a system to transfer the energy from the arena to the residences, while attempting to make it one of the most energy efficient hockey arenas in the world. With hockey arenas being such a large consumer of energy, it only makes sense to start developing more creative ways to stop losing valuable energy. I hope that the new Edmonton arena can have a minimal impact on the environment, and a large impact on the way we look at designing large scale sporting facilities. With a sustainable arena in Canada it will help pave the way for other community arenas to either upgrade their current facility or even rethink designing a new one.

Methodology and Analytical Approach

I aim to research how the heat from the cooling system can be transferred to the adjacent building. By studying how heat is transferred from arenas to pool, I hope to find a similar way to transfer the hot air into a venting system and circulate it throughout a residency tower. Also the air must be filtered and be as fresh and clean as possible. It will also be important to design the residential building to be as insulated as possible so that there is a minimal amount of heat loss. I plan to contact the design team that designed the arena in Pittsburgh for advice on methods to keep the arena more sustainable. There are multiple internet sites stating the pros and cons of ice surface cooling systems, and by using those references I will be able to find out the most efficient ways to use their energy.

Previous Studies

In Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh Penguins of the NHL just began to play in their new arena. The Consol Energy Center has just been finished and it has already received multiple awards for being a “Green” facility. The arena has been awarded the LEED Gold certification (Kasan, 2010), making it the first NHL arena to reach that standard of sustainability. I plan to design the new Edmonton arena with similar materials and efficiency as the Consol Energy Center.

Plans for Dissemination of Work

By the use of a blog I hope to distribute my information and new discoveries. This way it will be easy for others to keep up to date and follow along my research.

Contribution of the Project and Academic Goals and Objectives

With this project I hope to further my knowledge in arena design and residential towers. In the future I would like to get into the design aspect of building and more specifically recreational facilities. The architectural firm, Populous, have been creating magnificent sporting facilities for many years including; The Consol Energy Center in Pittsburgh, The Jobing.com Arena in Arizona, The Amway Center in Orlando, and many more. I could see myself fitting in very nicely with an architectural firm such as Populous, and with a background project such as this one it would certainly give me a leg up on the competition.

Through my research I also hope to help Canadian designers promote sustainable hockey arenas. There is such a large hockey market in Canada, even cities such as Winnipeg, Quebec City, and Hamilton are trying hard to get an NHL franchise. With an NHL franchise comes the need of a 16,000 plus seating capacity arena, and with that comes the opportunity to create something that can help save our environment and help promote sustainable living in Canada.

Canada needs to start looking at the big picture in terms of arena upgrades. There is such a large amount of energy lost every day through faulty equipment and out of date systems. I know that with sustainability comes a great cost, but there are future incentives to going ‘green”. Transferring the heat from these ice cooling systems to another building could have a greater initial cost, however it has potential to save money in the long run and it could be a first of many facilities to have these types of systems.

Welcome

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