What has heat recovery done for the cause or energy efficiency? If some manufacturers or heat recovery equipment are to be believed, the savings in ventilation costs are "quite staggering".
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in partnership with the NationalAssociation of Energy Service Companies (NAESCO) is demonstrating an approach whichintegrates indoor air quality (IAQ) improvements into energy efficiency upgrades provided toschools using performance contracts. Capital costs of energy-related improvements arefinanced, then repaid from utility and maintenance savings realized as a result of newequipment, systems, and controls. In five public schools in various climate zones across theU.
The main purpose of buildings is to provide a comfortable living environment for their occupants. This includes, among others, thermal, visual and acoustic comfort as well as indoor air quality. Except during the fifties and sixties, it has always been considered important that an excess use of energy should be avoided in the construction and the management of a building, sometimes even at the cost of user comfort. Energy saving is however not the main purpose of the building.
Builders across the United States are seeing strong sales of homes that can reduce heating and cooling bills by as much as 50°/o but cost about the same as conventional homes to build. In the process of designing, building, and analyzing these homes, they've learned lessons about systems engineering that all builders can put into practice.
The use of ceiling mounted circulating fans to provide air movement for cooling in industrial premises and animal houses is particularly essential in warm, humid climates. Methods to substantially improve the efficiency of this approach are demonstrated in this paper. Fan laws are identified as one source of strategies for increasing energy-efficiency of fans. Industrial ceiling fans are used to demonstrate that using larger, slower, fans will not only improve energy efficiency but also reduce fan noise.
Awareness of the need for energy efficient houses has never been so high, but are low energy dwellings delivering the performance they promised, or are comfort levels rising?
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