ARC Award

Consulting-Specifying Engineer Magazine: "Many engineers are predisposed to the notion that a high-performance building simply can't deliver ideal indoor air quality because of the costs associated with conditioning lots of outside air. To that, the engineers from Lentz Engineering Associates, Inc., say, "Nuts."

WWII buffs know that's the famed response of General Tony McAuliffe to a request by the advancing German Army for him to surrender at Bastogne. That bit of American vernacular confused the German officers. They didn't understand what the response meant, and very likely some readers now are also scratching their heads at the idea that high-performance buildings and good IAQ are not mutually exclusive.

If you were to ask Mike Sherber, vice president of LEA, he'd tell you that's because most HVAC systems are predicated on the concept that cooling is the dominant design parameter and that ventilation is not a controlled parameter, but a subordinate function of cooling. However, he maintains that by addressing ventilation directly and efficiently, HVAC systems can become much smaller, more efficient, more flexible and less expensive.

But this is not an academic debate. LEA, in completing and operating Wausau East High School, in Wausau, Wis., has put theory into practice this past year and with amazing results. The firm was fortunate enough to be in a position to benchmark the performance of Wausau East to a mirror-image school near Green Bay that employed a conventional HVAC system. Actual energy performance is quite amazing: a net energy cost savings of $164,000. But more notable are the metrics typically more difficult to quantify-lower rates of student and staff absenteeism and a dramatic reduction in the incidence of communicable illnesses as seen in other schools.

For this outstanding achievement, LEA has won this year's inaugural ARC Award for HVAC." - "A+ for IAQ IQ," Consulting-Specifying Engineer Magazine, December, 2005