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Serious Upgrade to Empire State Building

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Serious Materials has found a way to super-insulate the 6,514 double-hung windows in the Empire State Building and as much as quadruple their thermal performance. The  improvement will reduce the NYC landmark’s energy costs by nearly half a million dollars a year.

The company will remove 26,000 panes of existing glass from the window frames, separate and clean them, then insert new spacers between the panes along with a coated film and a insulating gas fill, upgrading them from the original R-2 up to between R-5 and R-8.

The painstaking work is all going to be done at night, to avoid disruption of workers during the day, and take about nine months.

Project partners, including the Clinton Climate Initiative and the Rocky Mountain Institute hope to encourage others to be inspired to follow the example of how the iconic skyscraper will be able to avoid 105,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in the next 15 years. Johnson Controls guaranteed that all eight integrated measures to make the building more  energy efficient will provide a payback within three years.

The lesssons learned that other commercial buildings can apply are at www.esbsustainability.com. The USA has no national building codes governing energy efficiency, so inspiration is needed.

Image: Flikr User S*Ong
Source: Greenbiz