ATLANTA — ASHRAE’s LowDown Showdown competition, an event of the Building Performance Analysis Conference, returned Sept. 27-29 in Atlanta.

The LowDown Showdown sought to broaden the industry’s ability to engage architects, engineers, designers, and energy modelers to create an effective workflow and an outstanding design in real-word building efficiency challenges. The contest encouraged participants to work as integrated teams to use their design and modeling skills to create a near net-zero energy building.

“The goal of the competition was to challenge participating teams to provide the most up-to-date best practices, work flows, and processes required to plan, design, construct, and operate a high-performing, low-energy consuming building that is environmentally responsive, responsible, safe, secure, and healthy for human occupancy,” said Dennis Knight, conference chair.

This year, teams were tested with a real building that was constructed in the 1970s. The building has a traditional variable air volume (VAV) reheat system in the office areas and is similar to thousands around the U.S. It is located in a challenging Northern Virginia climate, and it has large storage areas that have very specific temperature and humidity requirements.

This year’s LowDown Showdown competing teams were:

Nothin’ But Net Zero (Christian Taber, Nick Cavitt, Caitlin Bohnert, Nagappan Chidambaram, Jim Spielbauer, Alex Mazza, Aaron McNely, and Brittany Adam);

LowDown for Watt! (Lewis Morgante, Chris Win, Ryan Pedrotty, Griffin Green, and Zaida Parsons);

Sandstorm Stompers (Junaid Bin Naseer, Christopher King, Ali Haidar, Hassan Karawny, and Jihad Al Kalout);

Sustainability Savants (James Cullin, Kasey Richards, Lea Beauvais, Charles White, Alan Shepherd, Marc Brune, and David Mead); and

re+ro (Matthew Tokarik, Vipul Babruya, Mahsa Minaei, Brian Turner, An-Lei Huang, Yiyuan Jia, Keiron D. Nanan, and Shermeen Yousif).

Each team created an energy model and submitted a results spreadsheet, narrative, and poster using the templates provided. Teams were judged on their design’s energy use, practicality, and calibration as well as their teamwork, creativity, and overall presentation. There will be prizes for the top three teams as well as a fan-favorite team chosen by audience responses.

For more information, visit bit.ly/ASHRAE-BPAC.

Publication date: 10/5/2017

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