the
Sopris Carbondale’s
weekly, non-profit newspaper
Sun
Volume 2, Number 49 | January 27, 2011
It’s sleigh-ride time again up in Redstone. Blondie, a Belgium (left), and Snowman (right), a Percheron, led the way last Saturday. Avalanche Outfitters stages the rides, which are booked through the Redstone Inn. Outfitters’ spokesman Randy Melton said the sleighs range from two-person affairs all the way up to 20-person wagons. “Anything you want,” he said. Photo by Lynn Burton
Three years later, recreation center near full potential By Terray Sylvester Sopris Sun Staff Writer
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early three years after Carbondale’s uber-clean, green community and recreation center opened for business, town staff and energy consultants say they’ve taken the first significant strides toward making the building run as efficiently as it was designed. In the spring of 2010, consultants working for the town discovered the recreation center wasn’t behaving like it should have been. Despite the energy efficient features installed in the $4.815 million facility, the building was using too much electricity. By 2009, the price tag for the building’s gas and
electricity had climbed at least $5,000 above projections for the building, despite the fact that it wasn’t using wasn’t using as much gas as expected said Recreation Center Director Eric Brendlinger. That excess demand was cutting into the building’s climate friendliness as well. The recreation center generates much of its own energy through solar panels on its roof – about 66 percent of its electricity demand on a sunny day, according to Brendlinger – but additional electricity for the building is purchased from the grid, which includes juice generated from greenhouse gas-intensive sources such as coal. But maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that
it’s taken awhile for the building to live up to its full potential. After the Carbondale Recreation and Community Center opened its doors in March 2008 it became the first recreation center in the world to receive the top rating – platinum – from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification program. At the time, the facility was one of only a few LEED platinum buildings in the state. Another was a research facility at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden. “I had such trust in it for it being the first LEED platinum [recreation center],” Brendlinger said, explaining that initially,
he was reluctant to tweak the settings for the lights, the heating and cooling system and other features because they were afraid they would throw the facility out of wack. Now he has learned that to keep the building on course, he needs to keep a close eye on its energy consumption, or as he phrased it, a smart building needs smart people to operate it. “That was kind of a wake up call for me. ‘Wow, we shouldn’t just let this building run itself. We should actually be watching it,’” Brendlinger said. “I think that’s the lesson in this entire thing.” And now, as the town begins to impleRECREATION CENTER page 5
Hoopsters step up
Bill’s new hat
Action at WindWalkers
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