Re: Didn't Bush have mold in Gov. Mansion

July 7, 2004

Yes, it sounds like the Bush family was concerned about mold in their

mansion way back in 1999.

Indoor air quality hasn’t made it into presidential campaign discourse

so far in the proceedings, but at least one candidate has recent

firsthand experience on the subject. Some of the remediation industry’s

best consulting engineers, mechanical contractors, and equipment worked

to reverse IAQ problems in Austin’s 143-year-old Governor’s Mansion. As

a result, Gov. W. Bush and his wife are now staunch air quality

advocates.

“We all notice a significant difference in the quality of the air now

that the retrofit has been completed,” reports Governor’s Mansion

administrator Anne DeBois, who has served under four governors.

Previously, the 9,000-sq-ft, 27-room historic mansion suffered high

levels of mold and mildew counts during Texas’ seasonably hot and humid

summer months. The levels not only posed health concerns for

inhabitants, state workers, and thousands of annual tourists, but they

also created the expected unappealing odors.

Volz & Associates, Inc. (Austin, TX) spearheaded the renovation, which

also included roof replacement and security updates. The firm put

together an hvac team that had to:

* Ascertain how to increase outside air;

* Negotiate significant space limitations while getting that air into

the distribution system;

* Update existing equipment; and

* Determine that all work meets historical building guidelines outlined

by the Texas Historical Commission and the architect.

Constant Source of Comfort

A 75-ft PVC duct connects this Dectron (Montreal) dehumidifier to the

Mansion. The unique challenges in running this duct would convince

engineers to use an indoor humidifier later in the project. Photo by

J.T. Guerrero.

The IAQ problems were solved by consultants Holder, senior vice

president of Assured Indoor Air Quality (Dallas); and Bill ,

P.E., president of HMG & Associates (Austin). TDIndustries (Dallas),

the largest employee-owned mechanical contractor in the nation, was the

project’s mechanical contractor. While both consultants conceived the

solutions, ’ firm performed the design work. Meanwhile, Holder

developed the design criteria and served as commissioning authority.

“This was perhaps one of the most challenging and complicated design

jobs that I’ve had in my 26 years in the hvac business,” said ,

whose firm has provided mechanical and electrical consulting for

projects ranging from large 15,000-sq-ft residences to 300,000-sq-ft,

$50 million commercial buildings.

The existing hvac system consisted of a 20-yr-old double-duct, variable

air volume (VAV) design with 15 zones. Equipment consisted of two

30-ton chillers (one as a backup), a 300,000-Btu boiler, and one

built-up AHU. Although less than 10% of the system’s total 10,000 cfm

consisted of untreated outside air, that “small” introduction of air

during air conditioning season helped produce mold and mildew growth

that propagated throughout the year.

For the new system, the designers opted for a constant-volume system.

Equipped with three MagneTek (Nashville, TN) drives, the new approach

would vary the speed of the fan to compensate for resistance caused by

dirty air filters.

’ firm also specified a safeguard new to the mansion: a building

automation system. The new 600-NBC system from Siemens Building

Technology — Landis Division (Austin) would consolidate supervision of

the fans, VAV boxes, temperatures, humidity, building pressure,

chillers, pumps, boilers, and dehumidifier.

Replacing existing equipment, the designers specified two boilers from

Raypak (Westlake Village, CA), who had also handled the mansion’s

hydronic system and domestic hot water needs. Two new, 30-ton, Trane

(La Crosse, WI) chillers were also ordered. The existing AHU was not

replaced, but it was renovated with new coils and filters. The IAQ

aspect of the project, however, would provide the most unique

challenges.

A Remote Solution

In addition to serving as the residence of Texas' first family, the

Governor's Mansion in Austin contains many artifacts from Texas' fabled

history, many of which were sensitive to the building's summertime

humidity and mildew challenges. Photo by J.T. Guerrero.

The project’s onsite work started with a complete cleaning to rid

building surfaces and ductwork of mold, mildew, dust, and other

contaminants.

To eliminate the source of biological contaminants, and Holder

decided that a commercial dehumidifier combined with air purification

was vital to the redesign. They specified a makeup air RK-100

Dry-O-Tron unit from Dectron; the dehumidifier brought a

moisture-removing capacity of 137 lbs/hr and was able to provide about

40% (4,000 cfm of makeup air) of the building’s supply air volume.

As a further strike against existing IAQ problems, they had the unit

fitted with a multistage, gas phase filtration system designed to

remove outdoor air particulates and chemical contaminants produced by

automotive exhaust.

“We started with the ASHRAE standard, but then our final numbers

appeared to be enough to also satisfy our goal of reversing the

negative pressure,” recalled , referring to the “leakiness”

inherent in 19th-century building techniques.

To achieve both of these goals, a 20 cfm/person calculation was

specified for a capacity of 250 people. The building generally has less

than 50 people in it at any one time, but as with most governors’

mansions, the site is a frequent gathering spot for large events that

can attract that level of occupancy.

The mansion’s six-foot-tall crawl space mechanical area was hardly a

hospitable destination for a new 12- by 7- by 6-ft packaged

dehumidification unit. Furthermore, a rooftop placement would not have

complied with the historical landmark criteria, and doubted

whether the roof was even strong enough to support such a burden.

Instead, designers chose to create a walled-off area 75 ft away from

the building, where the unit could be custom-painted to match and then

installed.

The new unit still needed to be connected to the mansion to do any

good, and that was the job of a 75-ft, 24-in.-round PVC underground

duct. and TDI realized that it was important to pitch the duct

toward the building and outfit it with a moisture trap in the event

that any moisture entered the duct. TDI also soon realized that

trenching for the duct would be difficult because stones, bricks,

forgotten foundations, and other buried objects had to be circumvented

to comply with the aforementioned historical landmark criteria. On

several occasions, an arborist and/or archaeologist was called to the

site to consult with the TDI crew. “We had to call (the Texas

Historical Commission-appointed consultants) on three separate

occasions because our trenching ran into roots or an old foundation,”

says Ronnie Swingler, TDI project manager. Consequently, instead of a

straight duct run, TDI had to use several custom-made PVC elbows

ranging ranging from 30° to 35° to avoid various historical debris.

The design consortium also had to solve continual dryness in the winter

months, especially since the mansion’s public areas showcase

museum-grade artifacts dating back as far as Texas’ Republic period.

and Holder passed up a humidifier option on the Dectron unit,

fearing complications from arranging running water and drains for the

unit’s remote backyard location; instead, they installed an Armstrong

International (Three Rivers, MI) duct humidifier, offering a 40

lb/hr-capacity on the supply side of the makeup air unit in the

mansion’s basement.

All in all, the attention to detail, whether in design or underground,

paid off.

“We all notice a significant difference in the quality of the air now

that the hvac retrofit has been completed,” said DuBois. Even if the

current residents don’t wind up relocating to Washington, they at least

can survive the scorching Texas heat easier than Sam Houston ever did.

On Jul 7, 2004, at 12:29 PM, ldelp84227 wrote:

> I seem to recall a years ago that Bush had mold in the governors

> mansion. Not sure but thought one of them was having health

> problems.

>

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July 7, 2004