Commercial Commentary

Here’s a news item that caught my eye last week: the Energy News Network reported that new incentives from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center sparked significant growth of passive house-certified multi-family buildings within the state throughout 2021, and looks to rise even further this year.

Per the report:

In the past year, families have moved into 257 affordable housing units in complexes built to the [passive house] standard, and about 6,000 additional units are now in various stages of development. Early numbers indicate that this building approach costs, on average, less than 3% more than conventional construction and can slash energy use roughly in half. Air quality is higher in these buildings and residents report the units being more comfortable to live in. Many developers who have tried passive house building have been so pleased with the benefits for residents that they are eager to pursue more projects built to the standard.

Massachusetts isn’t the only area where passive house construction is growing in prominence and popularity. Another recent report from Bloomberg notes that demand for passive house construction is growing as homeowners contend with extreme weather and as governments incentivize building decarbonization. The Guardian cites a simple reason why passive house buildings are growing in popularity: “People love living in them.”

This all tracks with the broader trends around energy efficiency that are driving the commercial fenestration industry, but passive house strikes me as a particularly interesting development. Compared with, say, building codes as a driver for higher energy performance, passive house certification prioritizes the entirety of an occupant’s experience. Airtight construction, indoor air quality, sound reduction and extreme resiliency are all factored in. Passive house design principles also specify high-performance windows and doors, where solar heat gain is managed to exploit the sun’s energy for heating purposes and to minimize overheating during the cooling season.

Suppose you’re a manufacturer or builder looking to capitalize on the rise of passive house construction. In that case, you must equip yourself with the right technologies, backed by the required certification credentials and performance data, to meet demand. Passive house certification isn’t easy to obtain—and that’s the point. These are extremely efficient structures that seek to drive energy consumption to the lowest possible point; the annual energy demand of passive homes is estimated to be 70% less than that of traditionally insulated buildings.

Insulating glass is an obvious necessity for meeting passive house criteria, with triple-paned units likely a requirement in certain climate zones. True warm-edge spacer systems are a good option to meet thermal performance targets here. Elsewhere, vinyl and composite framing options can help meet the thermal requirements, but there are other criteria to consider as well. A vinyl system that eliminates the need for foam filling or complex strut systems to meet required levels of structural strength can help streamline the manufacturing process. Owners and occupants care about aesthetics, too. Vinyl systems that are available in durable color options can be a differentiator between your certified systems and other available passive house offerings. Passive house is a selective certification. If you’ve identified it as a market worth pursuing, that means you should likewise be discerning in specifying the right technology you’ll deploy to meet the right performance requirements.

Elevated thermal performance is the way of the future in the commercial construction space—getting ahead of the curve now can be a good way to separate yourself from the competition.

Joe Erb is commercial sales specialist for Quanex.

The pace of the fenestration industry has been red hot for over a year. The ebbs and flows of a typical busy season, followed by a winter lull, seem long gone. It feels like busy season all the time.

It has certainly been a challenge, and it may seem like there’s no time to do anything else on your shop floor except produce, produce, produce. Think about it: It’s February, a month when you might ordinarily find yourself with a bit of downtime. Under normal circumstances, it’s a good opportunity to perform some maintenance and housekeeping tasks you feel like you don’t have time for during the rest of the year. But it’s 2022—who has extra time (or people) on their hands?

No one. But that doesn’t mean routine service of your production equipment should go by the wayside. Now more than ever, I think it’s important to remind ourselves of the importance of routine maintenance tasks that enable efficient and high-quality production.

And it’s not just because lapsed maintenance routines may cause your equipment to go down. That’s a worst-case scenario, and the consequences of poor maintenance can cause problems far before the machine fails outright. Product quality can suffer when production equipment hasn’t been properly maintained or calibrated on the right schedules, sometimes in ways you won’t notice until a customer’s making a claim. Here are a few reasons why:

Garbage in, garbage out. I’ve written plenty about the virtues of high-speed automation for reliable, consistent production of high-quality insulating glass. Especially as labor continues to be a challenge and as you need to get as much as you possibly can from available raw materials, automated equipment can be of major assistance.

But whether you’ve been operating automated equipment for a long time or have just started, one thing remains true: It’s only as good as what you’re feeding it. For example, if your crews are loading roughly cut glass into your machine or touching up dirty glass coming out of the washer, you’re going to have aesthetic issues or potential glass breakage/failures no matter how sophisticated and efficient that machine is. What’s more, fixing or remaking poor quality units can eat into any efficiencies you may have gained by investing in automation in the first place.

Which brings us back to maintenance. Regular inspection of the wheels on your glass cutting machine is essential to ensure you’re getting cleanly cut glass every time. If you’re skipping this inspection, you may not realize your cutting wheels are too dull until it’s too late. The same goes for your glass washing station—it’s not uncommon for members of the Quanex Technical Services team to find that a glass washer’s brushes are not even coming in contact with the glass or that the machines are using dirty water.

These are the kinds of issues that can be easily missed if you’ve put maintenance tasks on the back burner for too long.

Don’t wait for downtime. Quality problems relating to poor maintenance routines are illustrative of why it’s important to make time to perform those routines—and make them a part of your year-round processes and operations. Regular maintenance schedules should be established, and following them should be just as important as any other part of production.

Of course, you may have found that the past year has disrupted established schedules and procedures that had worked well for you for a long time. Try to stay nimble—ask yourself what changes might be appropriate to fit the current conditions.

And remember: Make it a priority. Keeping your quality commitment depends on it.

Joe Erb is commercial sales specialist for Quanex Building Products.

In my final post of 2021, I mentioned how a continued focus on energy efficiency in the glass space would be a large driver this year. New legislation and building code requirements will drive emissions reductions in the commercial construction space, and the fenestration industry will need to meet the challenge with high-performance glass systems.

A prime example: The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which passed Congress in late 2021,  includes a provision providing $225 million in grants over five years to state and local governments to adopt updated building energy codes (including more recent versions of the International Energy Conservation Code, or IECC) and to train the workforce on meeting them.

That’s a significant amount of money we’ll see flowing into the commercial construction space—and cities adopting newer codes will need to leverage the right technological solutions in building projects to meet those aggressive targets. Since buildings contribute over 30% of total US greenhouse gas emissions, this legislation is a very important part of the United States’ effort to reduce greenhouse gases in the coming decades.

As the Alliance to Save Energy (ASE) notes, it will take more than just efficient building products to meet requirements:

Most states require code officials to achieve a threshold level of certification, but don’t require training on the code provisions they’re responsible for overseeing. This creates a situation in which workforce training is majorly lacking.

In an industry that is increasingly becoming more innovative and complex in its systems, it is even more critical that the workforce be up-to-date on the latest challenges and opportunities for energy efficiency. This means ensuring city and state codes officials, home builders, architects, energy auditors, and installers are brought on board with code changes.

High-performance glass and curtainwall systems have certainly become more innovative in the past several years and will continue to evolve to pursue higher thermal efficiency targets. I believe robust training for glaziers (and all building professionals) is a necessity for these systems to fully meet their potential. However, I don’t believe these systems need to be inherently complex. Seeking simplicity, whether within the fabrication or the installation process, is something that can benefit all stakeholders. And it can help our industry help builders make the most of that $225 million.

High-performance vinyl window profiles offer a good example here. They have increasingly become an attractive option for their ability to provide outstanding thermal performance. Comparatively, historically attractive for its structural benefits, metallic framing tends to need thermal break systems to isolate the interior space from the outside environment to meet modern thermal requirements. Today’s vinyl systems can deliver the necessary structural integrity while offering a simpler, high-performing and cost-effective alternative. Combined with the right insulating glass package, efficient and resilient vinyl windows are attainable for a range of commercial applications and can help satisfy increasingly stringent codes that will be adopted sooner rather than later.

Additionally, any measures our industry can take to help simplify the installation process can reduce the potential for error. Doing so will help us deliver the kind of performance that codes demand and builders expect. It’s incumbent upon fabricators to weigh these choices when designing high-performance products. Simple-to-install solutions can go a long way to supplement the required training that the infrastructure bill accounts for.

I’ll be very interested to track how the infrastructure bill impacts code adoption in the coming years. And I’m confident the commercial fenestration industry will be up to the challenge of providing high-performance solutions to meet those code requirements.

Joe Erb is commercial sales specialist for Quanex Building Products.