915 Broadway Street Project
Meet the Team
- Window Manufacturer: Alpen High-Performance Products
- Project Leader: Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance
- Informational Resource: Better Bricks
- Project Sponsors: Clark Public, Bonneville Power Administration
- Engineering Consultant: Energy 350
- Property Management Group: Hurley Development
The owners of this year’s Glass Magazine’s “Best Green Project” Award, the 915 Broadway Street Team, faced a monumental challenge: the 4-story multi-tenant commercial office building, constructed in 1979, needed an energy efficiency upgrade.
The Vancouver, Washington building featured 6,000 square feet of single-pane windows, offering little insulation from extreme exterior temperatures. Temperatures in the offices could reach 90°F on a hot day. Hurley Development, the property management group, needed a cost-effective solution that prioritized their occupants’ comfort; enter Alpen High Performance Products.
Alpen performed a modified retrofit on the building using secondary windows with their WinSert Super-Insulating Window Inserts.
After the retrofit, the building experienced a 13.4% reduction in energy use, reducing the temperature swings and dramatically improving the thermal performance and the comfort of the building’s tenants. Happy tenants make for happy owners, Hurley’s complaints about temperature swings used to come in daily, but since the installation of WinSert, they’ve received zero complaints.
WinSert works by incorporating super-insulating, high-performance, and lightweight fiberglass frames and “thin” glass laminated with high-performance films to improve existing single-glazed or lower-performing double-pane windows by up to five times the existing performance levels, says Craig Maierhofer, Vice President of Business Development for Alpen.
You Can Measure the Benefits
“On a record-breaking 115°F day, the entire fourth floor of this five-story building measured within one degree of setpoint at 72°F, where it would typically reach as high as 90°F on a 95°F–100°F day,” says David Berg, Vice President of Property Management.
“Alpen’s WinSert is an innovative solution to update existing building performance,” says Glass Magazine Judge Kayla Natividad, architectural and technical services engineer, NSG Pilkington. “The addition of a secondary insert allows for reuse of existing materials, limits waste, results in less embodied carbon than full replacements, and improves operational performance.”
If you’re on the fence about whether secondary windows like WinSert are for you, David Berg said, “I’d definitely recommend secondary windows. The installation was painless, and they’re performing exactly the way we expected them. I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to consider this for your commercial building.” Or watch the case study video here.
A Note About the Competition
The Glass Magazine competition had over 60 nominations from the glass industry’s best companies. Twenty-one judges awarded seven project winners and six product winners. The judges’ focus centered on solutions for some of our time’s biggest challenges, from climate change, structure resiliency, supply chain issues, and the skilled labor force shortage. The product competition winners were selected through public voting.
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