Save Carbon, Upgrade Existing Roofs

[John Simmons] Welcome everyone to this webinar. Very excited to have you all here. As you can see, we're working on how to save carbon by upgrading existing roofs. On our panellists today, we have Scott Squire, who is a technical advisor here at Nuralite. [Kate Meyer] Hi everyone. [John Simmons] Dr. Kate Meyer, who is a sustainability expert at Beca, and Glen Bilkey, who is a project architect for the Life Church. Just waiting for a couple more people to join the presentation. Okay, so I'll just take you through a few things. Firstly, this is a series of presentations we've been running since lockdown. We're probably up to about the sixth one now. Each presentation, we actually sponsor a community organisation that is working in the sustainability or social field. And so this week, we're gonna be sponsoring Planetary Accounting Network, which is Kate's organisation. And Kate, do you wanna just give us a few seconds to chat about what your organisation does? [Kate Meyer] Yeah, sure, thanks, John. So Planetary Accounting Network is a charity that's based in New Zealand, but with a global reach. And it works to take global problems such as climate change, but also biodiversity loss, land use change, all of the planetary boundaries, and to break them down into manageable chunks so that we can address them through our day-to-day decisions as individuals, as businesses, or as local and national governments. So I'm really pleased to be here, thanks for the support today, John. [John Simmons] Great, you're welcome. Do you wanna just flick onto the next slide, Jade? I think it's really important to just reflect on why we're talking about carbon. Nuralite, we're obviously the flat roof experts. We do membrane roofs. Why are we here talking about carbon? Well, this chart kind of sums it up. Our current projections, according to the United Nations, are planetary warming between three and 4% above the average. So that is just a number, and you go, oh, that'd be a bit nicer in the summer. But the last time we were 4% off the mean was when we had an ice age. And nobody wants to live in the ice age or the opposite of the ice age. And these timeframes are extremely daunting. I mean, this is during my daughter's lifetime. I'm not sure I'm gonna see 2,100, but to think that the planet is looking on a path to be exceeding those outrageous numbers is just unacceptable, and we have to act. And so about 18 months ago, Nuralite decided that we had to start doing something, even if we didn't see any of our industry peers doing anything. And so we moved and we went to carbon zero. We changed our behaviours internally. And then as part of that, that gives us the mana or authority to start talking about and how our supply chain uses or absorbs carbon. And so for us, it's really about turning the dial. I'm gonna do a quick poll now, just to find out a wee bit about our audience and how much you know about warm roofs in particular. We've done a couple of presentations already on them. And so could you just quickly answer whether you are familiar with warm roof systems or if you aren't? Cool. We're actually getting a large percentage, 75% are actually familiar with warm roofs. So compared with even two or three years ago, that's actually a dramatic change. Overseas, the default way of doing roofing. Okay, let's jump on to Kate now. And she's just gonna give us a couple of, run through a couple of slides about her experience. [Kate Meyer] Yeah, thanks, John. So we've been doing some really interesting work at BECA looking, sort of zooming out and having a New Zealand wide lens to look at what are the key transitions that can help us to rapidly decarbonise while we need to create jobs, rebuild the economy post COVID, and then address a number of other challenges such as warm and healthy homes. And if you take the breakdown as per the Ministry for the Environment emissions breakdown, building seems like quite a small piece of the puzzle, I think anywhere between two and 5%, depending on the way you break it down. But actually buildings have such a huge influence on so much more than that. The amount of embodied energy, so the carbon emissions and energy associated with creating building materials, steel and concrete, transporting them to site, actually building the building, and then the end of life emissions are all really major components. And obviously buildings are part of a very integrated system. So where we put the buildings and how buildings work really influence transport emissions and the way that we use cities and communities. If we jump to the next slide, I think I was talking at a talk the other day that John was in, I was talking about the most sustainable building really is one that we don't build. And for some time now, we've been talking to clients to really understand what their real needs are and to look at how much of a building do we actually need. And it's been really interesting for me this year to see how much more of a shift there is gonna suddenly be, I think, in the building recycling space. Once we know we have a building, there's a lot we can do through passive design to reduce energy demand and things like that. But if we can reuse existing buildings, we have a much lower starting point. So I've just been on a project recently that we looked at whether we were gonna demolish the structure or just do a really big refurbishment. And it was a 4,500 tonne difference, which was 90% of the embodied carbon of the structure if we kept the existing structure. And that has been the outcome for that building. And I think that will be more and more. Today, I don't wanna talk too much of the details and the specifics. I'd actually like to tell a short success story in the building recycling space. So if we jump to the next slide, this is a story of Arangi House. So the Arangi House developer came to Beca some years ago and said, look, we've got this space, but we just can't keep tenants in it. It's so uncomfortable. It's too cold or it's too hot. Nobody likes to be in it. It's leaky. They were really keen to demolish this building and to start again with a clean slate. And we said, you know, look, we really believe that we can make this building a space that you'd like to be in. And we're willing to be the anchor tenants if you engage us to help you with this refurbishment. And so that's what happened. We went through with them and looked at what we could do to upgrade this building. And so if we go to the next slide, this is a before and after shot. And the space went from something that really was very energy intensive and uncomfortable to a space that's really lovely to be in. I actually, this isn't the Beca office that I usually work in, but I spent two days in it last week. And it's just such a lovely space to be in. And it's actually, they've managed to make it naturally ventilated for most of the year. So we very rarely have to turn on the heating and cooling systems. And it's this lovely space. So what's really interesting to me about this project is this building's performance compared to new buildings, because I think a lot of people think, oh, well, you know, with a refurbishment, maybe we can get close. If we go to the next slide, I've got my slides in a different order. So this slide just shows that natural ventilation system. So we actually replaced all the glazing in the building with operable windows. And you can see there's high and low level windows that allows the air to come through and then exhaust out the top. We added in solar shading, but we also put external insulation onto the building so that it's really nice and cosy. So hopefully I've got my slides in the right order that the next one shows us the performance. One more. So this shows a whole lot of new buildings in New Zealand. And so a typical office building in New Zealand gets a three-star Neighbours rating. So that's the first bar. So that's a sort of a standard new build without any sort of sustainability considerations in the design. A lot of buildings perform a lot worse than this. So, you know, upwards of sort of 150 kilowatt hours per metre squared is not uncommon. But if you look at all these new builds and some of them really high performance projects, Arangi House is performing right up the top there at that 5.5 star rating. So that means that performance is down at the sort of 50 to 60 kilowatt hours per metre squared per year. So it's really quite impressive. One of the things that we did do to help that is something called building tuning. So I think one of the other challenges about buildings is they are quite complicated. And as you build a building, the energy profile goes up and up. And it's really important that through maintenance of the building and particularly of the building systems that we manage that. So typically what happens is the building performance degrades over time and every sort of three to five years, somebody comes in and gives it a bit of a tweak. But what we've done in Arangi House is what's called continuous tuning. So this is a typical, this graph shows typical. On the next slide, we see what we're doing in this building. And so what's great about this building is that when we first operated it, it had pretty good performance. And then we managed to get a further about 20% savings. I think it shows on the next slide. So it started at a four star rating and got all the way down to that 5.5 star performance through those control strategies. So I guess that's all I wanted to share today, but just to really drill in the opportunities that there are from building recycling. You know, there's a lot of savings to be made and recycled buildings really can perform as well or better than a lot of new buildings. [John Simmons] Thanks, Kate. That's an excellent overview and good to have that case study presented. I've got a couple of questions here and anyone else who wants to, there's a Q&A section at the bottom of your Zoom. Most people are familiar now. You can put in a question there and we'll pass them on to the panellists. But a question I've got come through is low-hanging fruit. What projects do you think are best suited to building renovations? [Kate Meyer] I guess there's quite a lot of old buildings that really need to be brought up to speed where there's other issues. We're finding that a lot of people are coming through, for example, with seismic upgrades that are needed and they're using those seismic upgrades as an excuse to do a whole building upgrade and improve the energy efficiency and change the way that buildings are used. And I guess there's gonna be a lot of renovations coming through with different ways of working post-COVID as well. [John Simmons] Great. I've got another one. What exterior insulation was used and why was it used on the exterior? [Kate Meyer] Oh, that's a really good test of my memory because this isn't one of my projects. [John Simmons] I'm really happy to- I can give you a hint. It was Stowe exterior insulation because it was on your detail. [Kate Meyer] Oh, excellent. Thank you, John. [John Simmons] Talk about a soft question. [Kate Meyer] So that worked really well. [John Simmons] Okay. Look, that's great. Keep the questions coming through but we'll move on to the next panellist. And that's Glyn who's gonna talk to us about the Life Church project in Mount Eden. [Glyn Bilkey] Yeah, thanks, John. Life Church was the existing premises at the top of Mount Eden Road just taken in 2012 for a site for the- construction site for the City Railway Link project. And they had to find another site. So three years later, they actually managed to get the old BIC factory site in Normby Road below Auckland Grammar which was an old industrial building which was built over a period of time between the 60s and the 90s in different stages. You can see it starts on the right-hand side there with the stage one and then stage two, stage three, stage four on the left-hand side, all at different times but all constructed with steel portal frames low pitched roofs, one and a half degrees. But we saw the potential in this to refurbish because it obviously had reasonable stud heights. We couldn't use the, with the auditorium we had to actually raise the roof because we needed more height for the auditorium which is a 1,750 seat facility. And they also look after children, have up to a thousand children on Sunday here for in all the different age groups. So, and plus, you know, big foyers, they've got a gymnasium, you've got multi-purpose spaces as well. So it's an ideal, it's a big building but the basic bones because it had industrial portal frames and had a bit of height was pretty perfect for their use. So majority of the building, we decided early on that a warm roof was the way to go because it's quite a lot of air handling equipment had to go in and we had all the new roof penetrations. The existing roof was not in very good condition. It was typically a metal tray roof. So we just basically made that decision very early on to refurbish, to put a warm roof over it so that the existing roof could remain and the construction could proceed, you know, without any weather delays because the process we had in the negotiations with Auckland Transport took about three years and then we had to get a resource consent which was complicated because we had the old plan and then the unitary plan and we actually ended up getting two resource consent. So it was quite a complex programme. So we had a very, very tight build programme because we had to move out of the existing premises at a certain time. So that was a decision that was made very early and we had Nuralite on board. It just was so logical because we, if you did any other system, you'd be getting thermal bridges everywhere. So, and it's also easy to do roof penetrations and waterproof them and it's basically bulletproof. So that decision was made and the existing roof, as you can see from the oval shot there, had a whole lot of different roof levels. So we just wrapped the Nuralite and the thermal insulation up the walls and up the walls where the steps and then over the whole roof. So we had a completely external envelope insulated, which made life really easy for us. And the other advantage is we had to do some new penetrations at a later time and it was easy to do. We added a recording studio and we had to get new stuff into it and we just made a hole and did it. So it was quite easy. So the metal tray roof meant that there had to be some packing in the bottom of the tray with the fixing points, which the contractor did quite easily. He didn't seem to have any problem. So it was all about just making it, making the thermal envelope, reusing the existing building, keeping the existing structure. The auditory roof itself was done under a different system. It was a Australian DuraPanel prefabricated roof, which was used on the convention set of roof at Court 5. We put a metal roof on that because we could put a greater roof pitch on it. And we also in the auditorium had crossland, all made of crossland timber from New Zealand crossland, which has now gone to Australia, unfortunately. So all the stairs were crossland air stairs, which were all prefabricated and craned into place. We've got LED lighting throughout the project and all this stormwater, because it's on a volcanic base, we will manage to soak on site. I'll filter, obviously, filter first and then soak on site. So there's quite a few sustainable issues that we dealt with. [John Simmons] So, Glen, that's an excellent overview. Have you, is this like a one-off project for you or have you done similar kind of renewal of buildings in the past? [Glyn Bilkey] I have done, yeah, I've done quite a few churches put into industrial buildings. And before we had a decent warm roof system, we would basically just put a suspended ceiling in and put the insulation in there, which was not good because you get all these thermal bridges. So this is a system that probably I used for the first time on this sort of job, but it just makes so much sense that if I ever do any more churches in industrial buildings, I would certainly use it again. You should become our sales rep. Yeah, but a lot of the churches are going to have to go to industrial buildings now. It makes sense to reuse them because they usually have a good height and you need height for acoustics. And there's so many objections in residential areas that churches tend to go into commercial areas now. [John Simmons] Okay, well, that's, I mean, that's a classic example of a low-hanging fruit. Scott, do you want to spend a couple of minutes just running through a warm roof builder? [Scott Squire] Yeah, sure, look, I'll keep it reasonably brief there, John. So one point that Glynne touched on there was the pitch of the existing roof. So being 1.5 degree, obviously that's a good pitch for the Neurotherm warm roof system. We're code mark certified down to 1 in 84. Situations where you've got an existing roof less than that pitch, we actually have, you can see in that render there. Now that render is based on an image that was taken during construction on the site there. And you can see the layer of branded board there. Now that's Neurotherm PIR, which is the insulation board. Now that can be pre-supplied with a one degree pitch already preset into that board. So situations where you might have quite a flat old roof, one way of overcoming that is using the tapered board approach. Obviously Glynne on this project, there was no issue, it was a flat board approach. You can see there that the metal tray is exposed. Now, obviously one key thing there is we need to make sure that the existing metal tray is structurally stable before the new system is installed. Now that's typically carried out by a licenced building practitioner or a suitably qualified individual. The metal tray is washed using a special solution supplied by us. What that does is that just cleanses any mould. Any rust in the buildup there obviously needs to be tackled before the new system is installed. In terms of the actual buildup of the new system, you can see some white segments there. Now that's an expanded polystyrene, which is simply there to act as a cavity and fill. between those seams. And what that does is it provides you with a relatively flat base to then instal the new system because the Enertherm board is, when it's installed, it's installed in a brick bond sort of pattern. So all the joins are offset. So by infilling those negative details in the profile, that provides you with a bit of a buffer to stop the board from bending. The next layer that you can see in there, there's a dedicated vapour barrier. That's the Nuraply ALU vapour barrier. Once that's installed, all of the joints, they're overlapped and that provides you with an airtight, watertight layer, which is obviously key for a warm roof system there. That just helps to control any moisture that might be in the building. The next layer there, as I talked about, is the Enertherm PIR insulation board. Now, that's a very lightweight product that has excellent fire performance. In terms of the compressive strength, look, it has a very high compressive strength. And in terms of the thermal performance, Glen, I believe it was 70 mil that was used on the Life Church. Is that correct? [Glyn Bilkey] Yes, yes, yes. We originally had added 100, but it was just a cost consideration that it was reduced, but it was still suitable for your requirement. [Scott Squire] Yeah, so in terms of comparing to other types of insulation, it has very high performance. So at 70 mil, it offers an R value of 3.15. 100 mil will offer an R value of 4.5. One key aspect of that is the insulation layer, like Glen talked about, is continuous. So you don't have any thermal breaks in the system, which means thermally it's very efficient as opposed to a traditional lofted type insulation fitted between rafters. And you can see there's some little wee blue dots there. Now, they're a mechanical fixing, again, part of our system, part of the Nuralite system. And that's a thermally broken fastener that's fixed through the board, through the vapour barrier, and then into the substrate below. So that whole system is mechanically secured. [John Simmons] And look, it offers- I've got a question come in about that, actually, Scott. [Scott Squire] Yeah, sure. [John Simmons] Is the Enertherm and polystyrene board suitable to be trafficable, or are special walkways needed? [Scott Squire] Look, it's suitable for light maintenance traffic, but yeah, look, in terms of if there's gonna be a high degree of traffic, then we definitely recommend a subsidiary system just to stop the board from being damaged. But look, the board itself is extremely robust. So I mean, in terms of the installation process, look, there's gonna be a lot of activity there. And the board, having high compressive strength, is pretty unaffected. But hey, like anything, if you were to drop a toolbox on it, it's gonna ding it, so. [John Simmons] And I've got another question here. This one's actually for Kate, because we've got about two more minutes to go in the presentation. We like to run it really tight. Kate, do you find that clients start the carbon compensation, or do you have to do it? And if it's you, how do you bring it up? [Kate Meyer] It's actually been really interesting. I've worked in this space for a bit over 10 years, and certainly for the majority of that time, it was me that needed to bring up those conversations. The last couple of years, carbon has just become such a hot topic. And we're getting clients coming to us more and more, saying we really need to understand our emissions. I think before that, and with clients that aren't ready for that space, we really talk a lot in the risk space. Carbon emissions and unsustainability is becoming a really high risk. For businesses, for directors, as well as for the environment. [John Simmons] Okay, I've got a question. I actually, this is what I'd spend the night doing. I read the government's document, Building for Climate Change, and they'd actually don't even consider upgrading buildings as a desirable path. They think that we can solve climate change by new buildings only. What do you think about that, Kate? [Kate Meyer] Is that the document that just came out about a week ago? I've actually caught up with a few people, and I think it's not, I'm not sure that that's the view. I think there's more challenges in mandating the upgrading of existing buildings than there are in mandating new builds. There's a lot of mechanisms and levers you can pull in the new building space that don't exist in existing buildings. And it's really interesting to look overseas and see some of the other mechanisms that there have been. But I think that's going up for stakeholder engagement, and I'm certain that there's gonna be a lot of effort in upgrading existing building stock as well. [John Simmons] Yeah, well, I hope so, because I think this is a challenge that we have to pull on every lever. It's like fighting the pandemic with by taking half measures. So, excellent. Look, we're now at 10.59, so we've got one minute to go. I've got a couple of polls that we wanna do before we wrap things up. Firing up the first poll is just a quick, how did you find the presentation? So if you can give us your feedback so that we can always keep refining things. While we do that, I'd just like to thank Glyn and Kate for their participation. It's been a really good exercise. For me, it's about raising people's awareness and having that carbon discussion and continue to have that carbon discussion. So I'm really pleased to be able to feature a project that often I think the building renovation jobs fly under the radar. And so we were keen to just highlight a really successful project to you. [Kate Meyer] Well, thanks for having us, John. Keep up the good work. [John Simmons] Thank you very much. Thank you, John. We've got one more poll, and that's just for anyone who wants a follow-up. Just click that and we will give you a call if you want a bespoke presentation, we'll come and see you. We've also got coming up a couple of presentations. We've got a mystery one in two weeks' time, which is, we don't expect many people to show up to a mystery one, but we will be announcing it via email when we launch a new product system. And then following that, we've got, well, what have we got? Oh, livable space. So that one actually is looking at how to make your building a livable environment on the roof. And then we're going to have a product one, which is looking at penetrations and fixing. So we're going to kind of get down into some more detail. That one there is a solar panels that were just added onto the Viaduct Events Centre, which we've been doing over the last few months. So yeah, go onto the education page and register if you're interested in any of those presentations, and we'll look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks. Thanks very much, everyone. [Kate Meyer] Thanks. See you later.