ASHRAE Chapter 135, Region IX

Idaho ASHRAE

Your fall 2026 chapter newsletter

Here’s what’s happening this fall

The chapter year is underway, and the next thing on it is an evening of cornhole and local beer at Powderhaus Brewing on September 24. It’s also our first fall on the new website, so if you haven’t been by yet, consider this your invitation.

The event will include Dinner, Drinks, Brewery Tour and a Double Elimination Cornhole Tournament.

Same address, brand-new website

We’ve said goodbye to the old StarChapter site. Everything now lives at idahoashrae.com, from the calendar and the meeting pages to the committees, the sponsors and the roster of everyone serving this year.

Chapter email got an upgrade too. Every board role has its own address now, so your note lands with whoever holds that seat, this year and the next. Here’s where to write.

What’s on the calendar

We meet most months, and four times a year we do something bigger. Here’s what’s on the books so far. The rest goes up on the chapter calendar as we pin down dates and venues.

This year’s Society theme

Most of the buildings that will be standing in Boise twenty years from now are standing today. That plain fact sits underneath this year’s Society theme, chosen by Sarah Maston. The work of making buildings efficient, healthy and durable belongs less to the drafting table than to the stock we have already built, and no one trade can do it alone. Owners, operators, engineers, manufacturers, code officials and commissioning providers all have a hand on the outcome, which is why she keeps returning to codes, to retro-commissioning, and to the unglamorous business of getting people in a room together. As she puts it, “There is no one-size-fits-all solution or game plan for retrofitting buildings.”

Ambition of this kind occasionally arrives with money attached. The Presidential Initiative Challenge awards between $1,000 and $10,000 to chapters whose projects carry the year’s theme into their own communities, and it runs the length of the Society year. A retrofit or resilience project here in the valley, done well and written up honestly, is the sort of thing the program exists to fund. If you’ve got one in mind, bring it to a meeting or send it our way.

Society has also done something rather unexpected with the theme and turned it into a video game. HVAC Hero sets you loose in a building to hunt down wasted kilowatt-hours in the company of a talking mug named Muggy. It costs nothing, it runs on a PC or a Mac, and it will not work on your phone.

Everybody wants to talk about data centers

You can hardly get through a lunch with a mechanical contractor these days without the subject coming up. The loads are enormous, the cooling is unfamiliar to anyone who has spent a career on offices and schools, and the schedules are brutal. If one of these projects hasn’t crossed your desk yet, give it time.

Society keeps its data center material gathered in one place, and it is a better first stop than a search engine. You’ll find Standard 90.4 and Standard 127, the Handbook chapters on data centers and telecom facilities, and TC 9.9’s Datacom Encyclopedia, which took over from the old Datacom book series and runs on an annual subscription. There are courses, Journal articles and podcast episodes, and a shelf of free white papers on liquid cooling, contamination, edge computing and the like.

The newest piece is a framework on AI data center energy performance that ASHRAE put together with NEMA and PNNL, written to follow a project from planning through retrofit. Start at ashrae.org/datacenters and work outward from there.

Say hello to our newest members

Welcome to everyone who joined us this year, and welcome back to the folks who came back around. If you spot one of these names at a meeting, go introduce yourself.

A big thanks to our sponsors

These companies keep the chapter going all year, and their support goes to ASHRAE research, to scholarships and to the chapter’s endowment. We’re grateful to every one of them.

Silver

SILVER SPONSOR Reliable Controls Since 1986, Reliable Controls has built a legacy of trust, delivered by people who care and technology that endures. Visit their website

SILVER SPONSOR DC Engineering From its inception, DC Engineering has sought to use our skills and resources to enrich the lives of the people around us. Visit their website

Bronze

Want your company on this list? Packages run from $1,200 to $6,000 for the year, and any single event can be sponsored on its own right up to the week before it happens. Ask Casey Crown at resourcepromotion@idahoashrae.com for the sponsorship packet.

Meet your 2026–27 board

ASHRAE Idaho Chapter 135

idahoashrae.com  |  info@idahoashrae.com

This newsletter is published by the Idaho Chapter of ASHRAE. It does not present official positions of the Society nor reflect Society policy. ASHRAE chapters may not act for the Society and the information presented here has not had Society review. To learn more about ASHRAE activities on an international level, contact the ASHRAE home page at http://www.ashrae.org.