I’ve worked hard to green the office space at thinkspace. Most of my effort has been on the interior of the building. I’m now taking my first step to identify ways to make my green office footprint smaller by improving the energy efficiency of the exterior.
Post people take steps to make sure they have weather stripping in the their homes because they want to have lower heating bills. For a commercial office building it’s even more important to have a tight building envelope.  With a huge number of windows and doors there could be many leak points. I’ve decided that in order to do it right, I’m going to use thermal imaging photography to find all of the cracks and gaps.
I met a person, Michael Johnson, at our Redmond Chamber Sustainability Committee meeting. Michael took this photo of our office building the other day. The area that is whiter around the windows is the area that represents heat loss. So based on this photo, it looks like the window sills are leaking heat. There are few low cost suggestions that Michael is going to make about how we can mitigate these leaks. Michael quickly has learned that I’m a guy that likes to implement green, but, I’m not one that wants to pay a premium for green. So his low cost suggestions really resonate with me!
Our next steps are to implement some of these solutions and then take more photos of before and after to show what a difference these simple solutions can make. I’m looking forward to having more energy efficient office space! I suspect that we’ll have less drafts and it’ll be more comfortable for the people that work inside thinkspace.
I find it interesting that the tree in the background is still green even if you take a thermal imagine photo! I’ll be posting more results about our thermal energy audit as I get more photos!