Alder House

A new apartment building on a tight urban lot, from the cellar up to a roof bulkhead, with apartments on every floor, an elevator, a dedicated water-heater room and bike storage. Every trade had to be designed to the NYC Construction Codes and filed with the Department of Buildings: heating, cooling and ventilation, plumbing, the sprinkler and standpipe system and the fire alarm, together with the NYC energy code documents and a DEP site connection for the building's sewer and stormwater. Like every New York project, the design also has to satisfy the NYC Construction Codes and the city's energy code requirements.

Mechanical: we ran room-by-room heating and cooling loads for the typical floors (more than 40 rooms) and selected a packaged terminal heat pump for each room, with an energy recovery ventilator for fresh air and continuous bathroom and kitchen exhaust on shared risers, fire/smoke dampers at the shafts, control sequences, equipment schedules and the NYC energy-code (COMcheck) sheets. Plumbing: cellar-to-bulkhead plans and riser diagrams for domestic cold and hot water, with booster pumps sized for the incoming street pressure, hot water from a dedicated water-heater room with a recirculation loop, reduced-pressure backflow prevention filed separately, sanitary and storm risers with the house trap, fresh-air inlet and roof drains, and the DEP site connection with peak sanitary and stormwater calculations. Fire sprinkler: a fully sprinklered building from the cellar to the bulkhead to NYC Building Code Appendix Q and NFPA 13 — light-hazard design for the apartments and lobbies, ordinary-hazard for mechanical spaces, quick-response heads, valve tamper switches and a combined sprinkler and Class I standpipe system with a fire department connection, coordinated with the hydraulic calculations. Fire alarm: an addressable system to NFPA 72 from the cellar to the roof — fire alarm control panel and remote annunciator, smoke, heat and carbon monoxide detectors, duct smoke detectors, manual pull stations, speaker/strobes in the common areas, elevator recall and fan shutdown. We issued every set for filing and revised them through DOB objections and review comments over about six months.