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Energy conservation at the Oak Park Public Works Center.

Article Excerpt
INTRODUCTION

The Oak Park Public Works Department serves a community of more than 50,000 people in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. In 2004, the Oak Park Public Works building burned down in a natural gas fire. At the time, all of the vehicles, as well as the street salt, were stored outside. There was minimal office space, and the fleet maintenance garage in a second building on the site. In 2004, plans began to construct a new building that would house all of the functions that the Oak Park Public Works Department needed. The new, 155,000-square-foot facility would house offices, shops, vehicle storage, a maintenance garage, and a fueling station, all under one roof. By completely enclosing all of the Public Works functions, neighbors would have no view of the industrial yard or the public works vehicles. (See Figure 1.)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The Village of Oak Park recognized the community's desire for a sustainable building that would minimize its impact on the neighbors. The Village set a goal for the building to achieve LEED Silver certification under LEED-NC version 2.1. The building would be the first public works facility to achieve LEED certification at the Silver level. (See Figure 2.)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

In order to achieve a LEED rating at the Silver level, the building would need to include a restored brownfield site, recycled content and low-VOC construction materials, a reflective roof with green roof portions, and solar domestic water heating. In addition, it would have to divert more than 87% of construction waste from landfills, and it would need to achieve energy optimization at 32.7% better than ASHRAE Standard 90.1-1999 (ASHRAE 1999).

The building uses two (2) variable volume air handling units to serve the office, administrative and shop spaces of the building. These units use electric resistance preheating, split DX cooling and terminal electric resistance reheat. Due to the large volume of fresh air required for the vehicle storage and vehicle maintenance garage, two (2) 100% outside air energy recovery units were used....

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