Agenda - Council - 04/22/1980 - Laserfiche WebLink

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UNDERGROUND SPACE CENTER · University of Minnesota Volume 1, Number 3 · March 1980 House Monitoring Project to Provide Energy Use Data Maybe you're thinking of building an earth-sheltered home because of the potential it offers for energy savings, but wish you had more accurate infor- mation about how much energy you can actually expect to conserve with an earth-sheltered home. Thanks to a monitoring project now underway, your wish soon may be granted. By late spring, the Underground Space Center of the University of Minnesota will be receiving data from more than 300 instruments designed to provide energy use and heat transfer data for seven houses in Minnesota. The houses being monitored were built as part of an earth-sheltered hous- ing demonstration project funded by the Minnesota Home Finance Agency (see Underline, Vol. I, No. 1). Two of these MHFA houses-state park resi- dences in Camden and Whitewater State Parks-are receiving extensive, "high-level" monitoring; the other five homes are being instrumented for "low-level" monitoring. Instrumentation for both high- and Iow-level houses will include inside and outside temperature sensors, relative humidity sensors, and sehsors to mea- sure various aspects of electricity con- sumption. Each high-level house will also include temperature differential sensors, status sensors to count the number of window and door openings and closings, heat flow sensors, a radi- ant solar energy sensor, and instru- ments to measure wind speed and direction. Approximately 70 tempera- ture sensors will be located in the soil surrounding the high-level houses to measure the thermal characteristics of the soil. Low-level houses will provide 16 to 25 separate channels of informa- tion, the high-level houses up to 120 such channels. Each house will have its own on- site data acquisition systom, which logs information from the sensors every 15 seconds, and averages these readings every 15 minutes, recording the aver- aged readings onto cassettes. The inhabitants of the houses will turn in the cassettes to the Underground Space Center for processing at two-week intervals. "Essentially," says Lane, "our in- struments are telling us how much energy is lost and where it goes-every 15 minutes. When we process these data, we can see how the soil heats up on a year-round basis and look at vari- ous kinds of temperature lags--daily, seasonal, and annual-that occur with earth-sheltering. "The sensors we've put in the soil will give us a very nice grid [of the soil] that will show how the heat moves through it. For example, at the Whitewater house there are 35 sensors in a grid format extending out about 30 feet from the wall. At Camden, seven sensors are implanted at various depths through the full depth of the roof-so we'll be able to see exactly what the bottom and top portions of the soil are doing thermally by plotting it on a grid." In addition to the seven MHFA houses, the Underground Space Center is monitoring an earth-sheltered house in a Minneapolis suburb during the winter months. Six instruments- temperature sensors and a relative continued on page 2 Computer Course on Earth Sheltering Now Available Requests for information about all aspects of earth-sheltered and under- ground building pour into the Under- ground Space Center, often at the rate of more than 100 a day. In response to this consumer demand, the Under- ground Space Center and Control Data Corporation (CDC) have developed a computer-based educational program that will provide people with a com- prehensive view of earth-sheltered building concepts and techniques. The five-and-a-half hour course, which is intended for use by both the lay public and building industry profes- sionals (e.g., architects, contractors, developers) is part of CDC's PLATQ computer-assisted instructional system. By April 1980, the course will be avail- able at about 75 Control Data Learn- ing Centers throughout the nation. Charles Lane, research associate for the Center and subject matter expert on the project, says that "the primary emphasis of the course is on the p~e- liminary information you should re- ceive and deal with if you plan to build an earth-sheltered home. This includes information on sites--orienta- tion, soil, and locations, for example- continued on page 2 Tom Foley Ground-breaking ceremonies for the new civil and mineral engineering building at the University of Minnesota took place on February 5. The $16.5-million building, designed by Myers and Bennett Associates, Minneapolis, will be 95 percent under- ground. Above, from left: University President C. Peter Magrath; Minneapolis regent Robert Latz; Roger Staehle, dean of the Institute of Technology; State Representative Roger Moe; and Charles Fairhurst, head of the department of civil and mineral engineering. ~ ';:: i