Building Energy Resilience

The building commissioning design review process provides opportunities to see how HVAC designers apply efficiency to pumping systems. There are outstanding designs and, unfortunately, some not so excellent applications.

I was cleaning my desk today and came across a napkin on which I’d scrawled some notes about why Building Performance Monitoring and Metrics (BPMM) are important and what the end game in developing building efficiency projects should be.

The New York Times recently featured a thought-provoking opinion piece on how human body heat may be used to meet the heating demands of modern buildings and other infrastructure. “The Power of a Hot Body” introduces the concept of building occupant body heat as a “green” design strategy that is both novel and low-tech. The blog showcases opportunities for capturing occupant heat from different types of urban buildings and facilities, such as subway stations, train stations, and malls.

HVAC building management systems are not immune from the need for computer security and defensive computing.

Fun and profit can come in unexpected ways to energy efficiency engineers. A couple of months ago while at a jobsite conducting central air handler control testing, there was the inevitable wait-around time. So I stopped to take a look at a central heating hot water plant we commissioned a couple of years ago. It’s a basic system - an all-primary layout with two boilers and variable flow 7.5 horsepower pumps, controlled by a piping differential pressure (DP) control sensor located in a remote section of the distribution piping. The plant serves a few dozen single duct VAV box reheat coils. A pretty typical system.

A recent Test and Balance (T&B) report for a central air handler made me really question the value of some of our current T&B practices. The system was a conventional variable air volume (VAV) air handler with a return air fan and single duct reheat terminal VAV boxes. The purpose of the T&B process is to adjust and record air handler performance to achieve the specified maximum flow rates.

I recently visited the construction site for a high performance building project that is pursuing LEED platinum through design-build. The design-build project has all of the bells and whistles that you would expect for LEED platinum: CFL and LED light fixtures with daylighting, energy recovery for ventilation air, and high efficiency heat pumps for heating. Given such a fine collection of green building hardware, I was surprised to find that the high efficiency heat pump heating systems did not meet the state energy code! The particular problem is that the heat pump thermostats do not support temperature setback schedule controls (i.e., scheduled reduction in heating temperature setpoints when the building is unoccupied). A high performance building that does not meet code – how can this happen?!

Cloud-based building automation represents an exciting opportunity for owners of small-to-mid-sized commercial buildings.

It's easy to forget to reset your building management system (BMS) or a direct digital control (DDC) system seasonally. Did you overwrite your building management system to forgo night-time building temperature setup due to the hot summer this year? Many buildings had a hard time maintaining their cooler daytime temperatures and therefore cancelled the energy saving nighttime setup program. Forgoing this energy savings was worth the extra hours the building was able to maintain proper temperatures during the workday.

Over the last year, I have become the proud owner of an energy efficient home. Designed and built from scratch, based on passive house principles by a team of local building professionals, construction is well underway, and the house will be completed by the end of the year.