What Happened in ASHRAEVegas: A Technical Member’s View
This post is part three of What Happened in ASHRAEVegas: a series about the 2017 ASHRAE Winter Conference in Las Vegas, NV. Cyclone Energy Group is involved with ASHRAE at the local, regional, and international level, and we’ll be sharing our various perspectives throughout the series.
This conference in Vegas marked my 26th conference! I attended my first ASHRAE conference in January of 2004 in Anaheim, California, and have missed only two since then. My involvement with ASHRAE since that time has focused on the technical aspects of ventilation as it relates to the operation of commercial kitchens and cooking. So I’ve been a member of both the Technical Committee and Standards Committees that cover these topics, TC 5.10 and SSPC 154, respectively.
While both committees cover the same subject, they serve different purposes. The purpose of SSPC (Standing Standard Project Committee) 154: Ventilation For Commercial Cooking Operations, is just what its title implies: It creates and manages standards for the ventilation of commercial cooking. These can then be adopted by code writing authorities such as the International Mechanical Code, or IMC, (they are a voting member of the committee), or can be referenced by design professionals as part of their design due diligence and ensure they are adhering to a “standard of care” as part of their design process.
The TC (Technical Committee) covers functions not addressed by the SSPC, such as identifying and managing Society-sponsored research projects that benefit the industry, presenting programs at ASHRAE conferences, and maintaining and updating the applicable Handbook Chapter. Basically, all the new ideas come from this committee; many of the same people serve on both committees.
So what did I do at ASHRAEVegas? At the SSPC meeting, we discussed potential topics to address in the next edition, since we published the latest edition in 2016. For the Technical Committee, I led an ad hoc working group to draft an outline for creating kitchen comfort recommendations, I led the Handbook meeting where we broke out into working groups to begin drafting the sections that will go into the 2019 Applications publication, participated in the Research meeting and proposed forming a team to create a project to create a commissioning guide for kitchens, and finally, participated in the Program meeting where I volunteered to lead the submission to propose a Seminar at the Long Beach conference on the topic of real life experiences during kitchen commissioning. I also attended a few seminars, walked the AHR show for an afternoon, and made a connection with a supplier who may be able to help us with future projects. (I also won $90 at the blackjack table!!!) So for me it was a very busy, productive, and worthwhile conference. And I am looking forward to doing it all again in Long Beach!
The Cyclone team at ASHRAEVegas
