NESEA BuildingEnergy Boston

Learn, Influence, LeadBuildingEnergy Boston is a conference designed by and for practitioners in the fields of high-performance building and design, energy efficiency, and renewable energy. It brings more than 1,000 industry leaders and emerging professionals together to learn from and share ideas with each other. Sessions are curated by a volunteer NESEA-Member content committee to ensure that conference sessions are genuinely useful to attendees.2021 conference will be held virtually, Wednesday-Friday, May 5-7. Wednesday will feature a Methods & Materials Showcase with live product demonstrations, networking events, and a keynote presentation. Thursday and Friday will feature accredited conference sessions that offer best practices and lessons learned, case studies and proven data, technical how-to’s, emerging technologies, and innovative policies and programs.In honor of the inquisitive learner in all of us, Getting at WHY is the theme of BuildingEnergy Boston 2021. We believe that focusing on WHY will empower building professionals with key insights to successfully approach and navigate challenges in their own work. Conference sessions will share what knowledge/experience/resources practitioners brought to the table and a commitment to getting at WHY they chose a certain path or course of action. Presenters will share their approach to a given challenge, in addition to what the data show, what they learned, and, our favorite, what they would never do again.Who AttendsBuildingEnergy Boston is an interdiscplinary conference that brings together leaders and emerging professionals committed to developing a more sustainable, healthy, and resilient built environment. Attendees represent dozens of industries including architecture, engineering, building, design, consulting, policy, finance, auditing, installation, construction, and education.If you are interested in transforming our built environment, this conference is for you!https://nesea.org/conference/schedule/8762Multifamily Humidity Control Problems: Muggy MayhemMultifamily buildings with good insulation, great windows, and decent ventilation systems – what's not to like? Unfortunately, over the past five years, we have received calls from multifamily building owners who are battling persistent summertime humidity problems. Comfort complaints, sweating ductwork, waterlogged drywall, and mold on furnishings, clothing, registers . . . you name it.We will discuss how we went about these investigations and the tools we used to diagnose these issues. When investigating these problems, unfortunately, there was no ‘magic bullet’ or single cause that we could pin down: it was often a perfect storm of factors. From air conditioner sizing vs. cooling load, to poorly configured cooling systems, to outside air ventilation system problems, to catastrophic air leaks - we will look at them all, and discuss how to identify and fix these issues.https://nesea.org/session/multifamily-humidity-control-problems-muggy-mayhemHistoric Buildings & Climate Change Mitigation: Case Study of a Low-Carbon RenovationRetrofitting vacant and underutilized historic buildings to PHIUS standards leverages an existing building’s embodied carbon, which combined with low carbon and carbon storing materials, can transform our historic buildings into carbon sinks. With careful consideration, the Federal Historic Tax Credit program can provide an additional source of funding for these ambitious Passive House projects. Currently under construction, Moran Square is one of the first PHIUS Historic Tax Credit projects in the US. The site includes a historic firehouse, a vacant lot, and historic three-story building.Our team is retrofitting the two historic buildings and constructing a new five-story building on the vacant lot. To push it a step further, this 44-unit affordable project is using low-carbon materials during construction. During this presentation, we will share this project’s technical enclosure details, photos of construction, and stories from the field. We will also illustrate how we managed to meet rigorous historic requirements of the Federal Historic Tax Credit program, while achieving ambitious PHIUS and low carbon construction goals.https://nesea.org/session/historic-buildings-climate-change-mitigation-case-study-low-carbon-renovation Kohta Ueno Senior AssociateBuilding Science CorporationKohta Ueno is a senior associate at Building Science Corporation, a building science consulting and architecture firm with offices in Boston, Massachusetts and Waterloo, Ontario. His responsibilities at Building Science Corporation include forensic field investigations, energy and hygrothermal modeling, building science research, and field testing. His undergraduate education was in Materials Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been with BSC since 1998, and completed his Masters degree with the Building Engineering Group under John Straube at the University of Waterloo in 2007. He is also conveniently sized to fit into attics and crawl spaces, which is markedly useful in this field.