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Transbay Block 6

01:29 Jan 10 2013 300-348 Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA 94105, USA

Transbay Block 6 Transbay Block 6
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I don't see how the passive cooling is supposed to work with both cool and hot exiting from the same set of windows, and no cross ventilation.
The west facing apartments will be too warm all the time.
MOD, help me out.
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It seems the cool wind air will enter the apartment through the bottom opening window. As the air enters the apartment it will warm and rise as a result. The rising warm air will circulate through the apartment and exit the top opening window. Pretty clever.
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Also, the design of these windows allows warm air to escape from the top of the cold air inlet, and cool air to escape through the warm air outlet. This will diminish the overall efficiency of this system. Air always chooses the path of least resistance.

I cannot see how you can set this up for multiple rooms. The main room, I get it, with the caveat explained above, but the air flow in the bedroom could be really poor as designed. How can you have efficient circulation if both inlet and outlet are on the same level?

Talking about passive designs, natural light is a great disinfectant which makes a windowless bedroom a very very bad proposition.

I had a friend a long time ago who worked on a similar design for an NGO in Africa. The goal was to sun-dry tomatoes. Enough said.
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So, $4.50psf rent and no A/C? Great.
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MoD,

The design is what it is. I am especially concerned with the windowless bedroom as I said earlier. Even my walk-in closet has better air flow.

They're building a glass box because this is what the market is today, but they want to minimize the costs (both building cost and theoretical cost of ownership). The way to sell the poor design it is through a token corrective design that will not work as well as they say it will. Ask the Beacon owners who are still in slow-cooking mode.
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"Block 6 Tower will attempt to leverage prevailing winds to ventilate and cool the building without air conditioning."

And in late September and October?
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Been quite comfortable in my low tech building without air conditioning for 30 years . . . and I even have windows in my bedroom. In fact, I have windows that face both east and west allowing "flow-through" ventilation which probably makes all the difference in the world. I'm not saying this won't work, just that I wouldn't want to be the market rate guinea pig for west and south facing units in this building. Seem like a design that simply makes the best of a bad situation.
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