Blogs in English from a Consultancy in Japan

My name’s Simon Forrest and I’m the translator at PTM and responsible for the English translations of our Engineer’s blogs. I’ve been asked to write one myself, so I thought I’d tell you about our International Projects Group and why we are translating these blogs into English.

PTM is a company of consulting engineers based in Tokyo. Although the bulk of our projects are domestic we do have an Overseas Projects Group that mainly does consultancy work for international banking and securities companies, but also for various other types of companies either setting up offices or relocating in Japan. Many of these projects are ‘mission critical’, which means we have to ensure any construction work does not interrupt the client’s business operations – there can be no outages in power while modifications are made to the electrical system.

Recently many clients have also recognized the importance of conserving energy, so we also provide solutions to reduce energy consumption. Many potential and existing client’s employ people from overseas so we thought it was important that the blog be available in English.

You will notice that the focus of recent blogs has been energy saving. After the earthquake on March 11th this year and the subsequent prediction of a shortfall in power supply, we were called on to provide energy saving advice to a number of clients. It was also felt that as consulting engineers we had to make our own efforts to reduce energy consumption. This coincided with the decision to get our engineers blogging, and they naturally focused on this energy conservation work.

Anyone who has ever tried to get their staff blogging will know that it can be difficult to motivate people and get them involved. They often have other work to attend to which they feel is more pressing, so there have been a few lulls in our blog activity. However people seem to be getting used to the idea and I’m sure we will continue to keep posting.

Simon Forrest
http://www.ptmtokyo.co.jp/

Nebuta House Warasse

Akira Katayanagi

I’d like to tell you about Nebuta House Warasse for which P.T. Morimura did the building services design. This facility opened in January 2011, and I was pleased to go back to the site for the first annual inspection. I was reminded again what an excellent place it is and was inspired to write about it for ‘Engineer’s Voice’.

Nebuta House Warasse is an exhibition hall situated towards the coast from Aomori station. The Architectural design was carried out by Molo Design with d/dt Arch, Frank la Riviere Architects. Molo Design is a design studio based in Vancouver, Canada and their projects include the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which achieved worldwide acclaim.

The exterior screen of Nebuta Hall, formed from highly corrosion-resistant steel ribbons.

Photograph: Shigeo Ogawa

The annual Nebuta Festival is a major event on the cultural calendar, at which huge paper lanterns or floats called nebuta, are built by members of the local community and pulled through the streets to the sound of traditional flutes and drums. There is a competition for the best floats and the winning top five are displayed for the following year in the exhibition space at the centre of the Nebuta Hall. Traditional music fills the hall giving visitors a taste of the atmosphere of the actual festival.

 



Nebuta on display in Nebuta Hall
Photography: Shigeo Ogawa



Next I'll tell you a little about the power supplies used in Nebuta Hall.

As you can see in the photograph the nebuta lanterns are brightly illuminated. During the actual festival they are equipped with their own power source for lighting in the form of a diesel generator. However, this is not the case with the ones on display which are illuminated by a power supply which we developed. With five lanterns on display in one place, the main concern during design and construction was how to avoid over illumination of the space. To this end we measured the brightness of the lanterns during the actual festival,. Although they appear very bright, the actual luminance is only about 100lx which is not particularly strong.

However, in view of energy saving, we installed large dimmers to adjust the brightness of the lanterns. That way the hall is not overlit, adding to the impact of the exhibition. The white box you can see in the photograph below is a large dimmer unit enabling control the power supply voltage to reduce the power used by the lantern.



Large dimmer unit for controlling voltage of the lantern power supply.



Nebuta House Warasse has been open one year and looks like it is attracting an endless stream of visitors.  If you are visiting the area I highly recommend you drop by to see it.

The nebuta lanterns are the pride and joy of Aomori and I hope that along with Nebuta House Warasse, they continue flourish.

Akira Katayanagi

http://www.ptmtokyo.co.jp/



This summers energy saving – conclusions part 1

This summers energy saving – conclusions part 1

My name is Shuji Imura and I work in the environmental department.

Just as I was beginning to appreciate the refreshing arrival of autumn, there was in fact a report that even severer energy saving measures than those taken during the summer would be required through the winter. Kondo-san’s blog post (Sept 12th) focused on the importance of continuing energy saving efforts.

This and the next blog shall cover the results of our energy saving efforts.

Energy saving awareness

With the energy saving activities underway, one of the main problems was to raise awareness within the company. Ideally we wanted steadily increasing understanding of the changes in the office environment, leading to various individual energy saving efforts however, we formed a patrol group to provide a degree of structure.  Patrols were selected for each group in close contact, aimed at determining and carrying out energy saving measures.

Concrete measures were taken such as partially turning off air conditioners and lighting, or shutting down the air conditioning and opening windows and providing general cooling with outside air.  This proved a workable solution on several days during the summer, and it is an approach we expect to use again in the future.



Member of our Energy Saving Team wearing the official armband

Increasing awareness

There is a strong desire to keep up the energy saving activities.  We are used to being in spaces where there is too much lighting and air conditioning, and we weren’t particularly conscious that it had changed. Then, the environment to which we entrust our comfort is an unnatural space. It was the exchange of opinions with architects working on office buildings that led me to believe this. Their opinions differed from ours in that they were about how to create a comfortable space with a more natural low-tech system (plants and fans, and evaporative cooling using wet cardboard).  This gave us the idea to implement a “green project”.

Although I think the aims were good, hydroponics using ivy was more difficult than we expected, and it sometimes wilted. We will try again next year but with some improvements. 

Energy saving results (based on estimated monthly power consumption)

Of course, this summer the reduction of peak demand was important with this summers energy saving efforts peak demand for electricity dropped however, we are tenants in the building, so we the only results we could get from last year was the our total power consumption from the electricity meters making it easy to make a comparison. Overall we achieved reductions of 30%!

We have data on this summer’s peak demand from a real-time power monitor which we installed so, I’ll be looking forward to hearing about that in the next blog on the mechanical aspects by Nakamura-san.

Shuji Imura, Environmental Group