Starting off in 2016,  two projects our firm has been involved with were featured in The Washington Post and Prince William Today . The first has involved our team members for several years and that concerns the transformation of the former Lorton prison property into a mixed-use community. SAI Engineering has provided the electrical systems design for the first phase of the project, 165 apartments with ancillary buildings, in partnership with the Manassas office of Benfield Electric. This phase, which broke ground last fall, is scheduled to be completed next year. The other project, Habitat for Humanity ReStore, is set to open at the end of January 2016 in Manassas, Virginia. SAI Engineering is very proud to have teamed with Loveless Porter Architects to assist Habitat for Humanity Prince William in relocating its Manassas site. The community looks forward to having a Woodbridge location in the near future. Please consider contributing household items to stock the stores...

What better way to welcome in  the New Year than with SAI's own Jack Frost. As we weather record warm temperatures with a 100% chance of a Green Christmas, this may be as close as we get to celebrating snowflakes, albeit in the form of Robert Browning. Shocking display from the electrical design department and from a member with a very appropriate last name, too, given the current landscape here in Woodbridge, Virginia. Cheers to all and may you have a very prosperous 2016!

The coming of fall signals a new school year and with that the sad departure of the very fine interns SAI Engineering was fortunate to have this past summer -- Jacob Lasrado, a third year electrical engineering student at Virginia Tech, the recipient of an engineering scholarship from SAI while a senior at Woodbridge High School, and Bill Swift, a third year mechanical engineering student at Purdue University who attended Thomas Jefferson High School. Both fit right into the collaborative team culture that is SAI and were instrumental in assisting with several projects including designing systems to support well pumps to irrigate sports fields for Loudoun County schools. We wish them great success in the coming year. These young men join a cadre of dozens of interns that SAI has employed over the past two decades, some of whom became full-time employees, and nearly all of whom went on to gainful employment in the field of engineering. Last school year we partnered with the new Governo...

On behalf of SAI Engineering, George Preston and Maria Paslick presented a $1,500 scholarship to deserving Woodbridge High School and Project Lead the Way engineering student, Jacob Lasrado, on May 23, 2013. The presentation was part of the annual Senior Awards Ceremony attended by students, parents and dignitaries. The scholarship is one of many administered under SPARK, the education foundation for PWCS, an organization that SAI has been a part of for over a decade.  George happens to be a 2001 alumnus of Woodbridge and went on to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech, where Jacob also will attend in the fall. The occasion marked SAI's return to a school where it helped launch the Project Lead the Way engineering program and also supported the County's first robotics team back in 2000. In attendance was retired teacher and mentor Don Maeyer who played an instrumental role on that nationally awarded robotics team. SAI was also pleased to hi...

A visit to the famous Greenbrier Resort "bunker" (aka "Project Greek Island") in White Sulpur Springs, West Virginia, truly brings to the forefront the importance of MEP systems that we so often take for granted in our everyday life -- that is, until they don't work.  Back in the late 50's, President Eisenhower held meetings at the Greenbrier with the leaders of Mexico and Canada, while also secretly meeting with the head of the C&O Railway Co., which owned the resort at the time. It was an era of great concern about nuclear proliferation and the "Cold War" with the Soviet Union. After all, the U.S. had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima to close out WWII, and the Russians had since developed their own nuclear arsenal. Many Americans responded then (and even now) by assembling household supplies and building makeshift shelters. Likewise, the U.S. government began the secret search for a fallout shelter for Congress to evacuate to and con...

You may wonder what ignited the geek so to speak or, put another equally corny way, what event livened the wire in the brains of our electrical design team.  In the case of the youngest member of our team, Robert, who has worked for SAI since his high school days as an intern returning upon graduation from college, the seed was planted even earlier in his education--first grade to be exact when he landed in trouble for putting a staple in an outlet in order to see what would happen. Let's just say sparks flew literally and figuratively.  For Badri, who hails from Nepal though he became a U.S. citizen several years ago, it was the "shock" he received when using the primitive heaters of his childhood to boil water that drew him to learn more about electricity. He originally came to the States to study electrical engineering with plans to return to Nepal to work on the hydroelectric plants being built throughout Nepal and India by Enron in the 1990's. Well, we a...

There is a lot of discussion lately about UPS and standby systems (and, no, we are not talking about methods of package delivery or airline flight status). Given the shaky state of the power grid, climate change induced weather events and a greater demand for electricity both in the U.S. and globally, power quality and power reliability have become major issues for commercial as well as residential customers.  U ninterruptible P ower S upply systems, commonly referred to as UPS systems, can filter incoming power to protect against electrical "noise" such as spikes or transients ( i.e ., a type of pulse caused by factors such as lightning, switching surges, or kick-in of large motors), thereby improving power quality in our increasingly data-driven world. The need for UPS systems is particularly acute for data centers, office server rooms and telecom equipment spaces, or any computer-intensive environment. Typically, UPS systems also have batteries...

We would all like to think that dimming lights signals the start of an exciting movie or show. However, there are frequently times in our daily lives that our lights dim at home or work while electronic devices thankfully continue unabated. Given recent weather events in the East--the June derecho and the October hurricane, not to mention the occasional passing wind gust (not gas) or thunderstorm, many of us have experienced a lack of electricity, stopping us in our tracks so to speak. Power or electricity is delivered to our homes and workplaces for the most part on a multi-phase basis. Oftentimes, power loss is preceded by a dimming of lights--followed by a complete blackout, or for the fortunate, immediate restoration to full power. If one line goes down due to tree limbs or other debris, human or animal damage or gusts of wind, single-phasing comes into play resulting in dimming until full power comes back or all power goes...

The start of a new school year brings to mind SAI Engineering's long-standing relationship with Minnieland Academy which currently has 10,000 children enrolled in its various programs and employs 2,000 people.  We are proud of our affiliation with Minnieland resulting in over a dozen new facilities, including the new Minneland at Belmont in Loudoun County.  SAI Engineering would like to take this opportunity to express well-deserved congratulations to the folks at Minnieland on their 40th anniversary and thanks for their many contributions to the community.  Our CFO, Maria Paslick, serves with Minnieland's COO, Chris Schuster, on the board of SPARK, the Education Foundation of Prince William County Schools. SAI Engineering is also proud of its collaboration with Colonial Webb on the addition of a new cooling tower and two new chillers at Lake Ridge Middle School.  The school's air conditioning broke down in the spring and the p...

A perfect example of a successful design-build approach is SAI's partnership with Lantz Construction out of Broadway, Virginia, on the expansion/upgrade to the Rubbermaid Commercial Products manufacturing facility in Winchester. The company is adding high-tech, energy-efficient injection molding machines at the site where Rubbermaid Commercial Products has had its headquarters since 1968 and continues as one of the city's largest employers. The project is featured in July's Virginia Business magazine on page 19.