Brian Uher, Amicus Consulting Services
Community Building in the Washington, DC area!!
|
|
SFP Editor: What brought you to DC and what about DC do you enjoy the most?
Brian Uher: I arrived in Washington early in 2002. I was working in e-commerce in Philadelphia and had learned what I wanted to learn and was ready to move on. The woman I was dating at the time had moved here for a job and there was no reason not to make a break with the northeast...Certainly the most remarkable thing about DC is the proximity to national representatives of our industry - whether the USGBC or the NAHB or the ULI, it's all here.
SFP Editor: What inspired you to start Amicus Consulting Services?
Brian Uher: Absence. There was an absence in the marketplace of entities putting the pieces together. Traditional development and construction is so cognitively fragmented, it is a near-miracle that anything that gets built stands or functions well. Most often, there are issues - hot rooms, drafts, break-downs prior to the end of the warranty period, closets that are too tight, gigantic rooms that are cumbersome to use and furnish and always cold in winter, kitchens that don't function, narrow hallways, poor ventilation, etc. Addressing these issues simultaneously addresses energy conservation, comfort and air quality-is, simultaneously, "green" in our definition of "green-as-energy-use-focused". All can be solved in a manner profitable to the industry and cost-effective for the client. It is not a zero-sum game, as the industry had assumed. Creating the solution is what we wanted to do and what we now do everyday.
SFP Editor: What opportunities are there for homeowners to incorporate green living in a cost effective way?
Brian Uher: As with any practical challenge, there are not an infinite number of solutions - which is a darn good thing. Given a home's size, age, layout, structure, price-point, the homeowner's timeline of ownership, and the real estate industry's moves toward including "green" attributes in valuation, there are really three phases of "green-up": immediate, consumable fixes, small-scale capital project fixes, and wholesale restructure. Which projects you undertake should be governed by: 1.) your return-on-investment time horizon and 2.) your personal minimum return-on-investment number (5%, 10%, 15%, etc.) and 3.) how strongly you feel about getting a particular issue addressed (be it comfort or savings). That's it. That's the underlying decision logic.
So, let's take a look:
Low-flow showerheads, bricks in the toilet tanks, wrapping your hot water pipes. Total time for purchase run to Amicus and then install: 2 hours, total yearly savings (guesstimate) $200+$30+$30 = $260 or so, at a materials cost of $50 plus gas. For the sake of easy math, $250/$50 = 500% return on investment, first year. I count your time as free, unless of course you get paid to watch basketball on the weekends.
Capital projects like insulation, air seal, HVAC and windows are slightly more involved. The decision process generally benefits from an energy audit that provides at least ball-parking energy model results. The value proposition here is incredibly straightforward: you pay an auditor $500 to avoid $3000 to $20,000 worth of useless retrofits (example: energy savings from windows almost never pay back within 20 years of install). You are paying for expert information. Period.
In gross terms, air sealing and insulation are the very first moves you should make. Duct sealing may also be relevant. Cleaning the HVAC system, duct sealing (if you have them) and then proper maintenance. Install costs are hard to guesstimate due to the specific nature of each retrofit; but we have derived some quick tables at Amicus to allow us to ballpark the savings numbers with reasonable accuracy. This makes the decision fairly straightforward. More importantly, comfort issues and air quality issues tend to be addressed with air sealing, less so with insulation. Together, you usually get an 80% to 90% fix on comfort issues using our "first things first" rule of thumb.
SFP Editor: What are the current trends for providing healthy living and work environments from an architectural/building standpoint?
Brian Uher: Well, the third-party verification standards - NAHB, Arlington Green Choice, LEED, Earth Advantage, etc., provide guidance and also marketable branding. They are immensely varigated, despite all focusing on the same 20 or so issues. Currently, they function as quasi-performance standards, but unlike real engineering standards, are not based on empirical checking - i.e., no one is beholden to actual post-build performance. This is due to the absence of assembly line manufacture in my opinion, which is changing, and due to basing the early designs on past logics and rules of thumb alone, rather than in conjunction with computer-based performance modeling (pre-build testing, if you will); this latter situation is also changing.
That said, the current trend in health is for designers to focus on air quality. This is because 1.) the contents and quality of air seems to be the source of most health issues and 2.) we can actually get control over it cost-effectively.
At the office, this includes using non-offgassing materials, improving the function of ventilation systems, and improving local thermal controls (personal thermostats). In residential design there is a focus on materials and thermal control (zoning) but a reduced emphasis on filtration and appropriate ventilation schemes. In my experience, this may be due to cost and a lack of industry expertise.
SFP Editor: Do you have any key environmental passions that you see as critical in the next decade?
Brian Uher: Last year, I pulled census and housing data to ask "what percentage of the housing stock in 2020 will be made up by houses already standing?" The answer is terrifying: 90%+ of 2020's housing stock already exists, today. In other words, if you believe in Pareto's 80% rule, the major issue in residential energy efficiency and energy hedging is retrofitting existing homes. That's 40%+ of the national energy nut - and the greatest challenge, since it is "distributed", which is to say diffused in small iterations over big spaces (think suburbs). It is also the cash flow to fuel a consumer economy (imagine getting $3000 a year in utility costs freed up for other purposes...that is an 8%+ raise to most Americans, more than enough to finance the retrofit and permanently reduce the risk profile of home ownership).
And all of the green standards available today are interested in new construction...because it's soluble, to paraphrase Peter Medawar.
So, what we do at Amicus Consulting Services is solve the infill and retrofit challenges of residential building. This means single and multi-family energy efficiency, add-on construction, gut rehab, infill, material supply, etc. It's our focus. We handle design, specifications, construction documentation, material supply and project oversight in-house. Integrated, one phone call.
SFP Editor: What Environmental complications do you see facing urban planning today in DC and country-wide?
Brian Uher: Transportation. If you live in DC and have not yet realized the amount of productive and emotional energy spent pounding on steering wheels and not in constructive or happy ways, then you just aren't allowing yourself to acknowledge a real threat to the American, no, the human dream. Solving this problem means taking existing space from private hands for transport systems...at immense cost. This means great battles, great resistance. You see this with the IC connector in MontCo and with the Purple Line. It is the planner's biggest battle.
SFP Editor: What has been the most challenging about starting your own business?
Brian Uher: Marketing and then cash flow. Very strong ideas, immensely talented associates, and real, complete solutions to hard problems we have...
SFP Editor: What has been the most rewarding about consulting on environmentally safe building?
Brian Uher: Seeing a solution work, actually solving the challenge and seeing the client actually experience the relief and happiness they were looking for...you can't buy that, you have to earn it.
SFP Editor: Do you have advice for folks who would like to pursue a career in architecture and green building?
Brian Uher: You must be trained in a cross-disciplinary fashion. You must understand biology and physics. You must understand what statistical analysis is, how it is used, and its inherent limitations. You must understand basic economics. You should understand systems theory (hint - William Ross Ashby). You really must respect human goals and needs as well as comprehend and respect the apparent limitations of nature / the ecological system (it is, after all, a system). You ought to consider avoiding ideology in your own thinking, completely and totally if possible; it will protect you from catastrophic failure. Finally, don't forget that aesthetics and artistic thinking most often are the source of elegance and joy, so they should occupy a central place at the table of your process. How you achieve this is open to infinite solutions....
SFP Editor: What has influenced you the most to succeed at your business and passion for the environment?
Brian Uher: Hmmm...the need to not give up, I suppose; the need to make it real. That, and the commitment of so many others in the field who really are doing the work and sharing the solutions.