Topics
Healthy, Airside Solutions to Significantly Reduce Your Building’s Carbon Footprint

In the face of significant energy costs and concerns over global warming, buildings are receiving increasing scrutiny to reduce their carbon footprint and cut their energy expenses while still being sustainable and providing a healthy indoor environment.  For many buildings, outside air is the largest single driver of both a building’s energy efficiency and its indoor environmental quality however the results of using such approaches as economizers and demand control ventilation to optimize outside air have been mixed at best. This talk discusses and presents case studies on a new, more energy efficient and healthier approach to demand control ventilation as well as describes how economizers can be operated more reliably with greater energy efficiency in educational, commercial, and healthcare facilities.

New Approaches to Slash Lab and Commercial Building Energy Use and Improve IEQ

In the face of significant energy costs and concerns over global warming, buildings are receiving increasing scrutiny to reduce their carbon footprint and cut their energy expenses. For many buildings outside air is the largest single driver of both energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality.  Demand control ventilation has attempted to reduce energy expenses by controlling outside air but the actual results over time have been mixed at best. This talk will discuss and provide case studies of both commercial and laboratory buildings for a more energy efficient and healthier variation on demand control ventilation that uses a new, cost effective, and more accurate sensing approach known as multiplexed sensing.

Slashing Lab and Vivarium Building Energy Use by up to 50%

The largest source of a laboratory or a vivarium’s energy consumption and carbon emissions is often the significant use of outside air to provide high Air Change per Hour (ACH) dilution ventilation. In the past a prescriptive approach to ventilation was advocated that made it difficult to save energy in these facilities. However, a demand based control approach to ventilation is now being used successfully in many facilities to cut HVAC energy use significantly. This approach as mentioned in the new 2011 ASHRAE Applications Handbook uses real time sensing of lab room contaminants to vary the minimum ventilation rate of the lab or vivarium to provide both better safety and lower energy use.  This talk will review the concept and an enabling technology as well as provide some case study results and quantitative analyses of energy savings and first cost impacts.

A Holistic Overview of Technologies and Strategies to Achieve Deep Energy Reductions in Laboratories

As we strive to build more energy efficient laboratories and vivariums, the most impactful approach is often to reduce the outside airflow.  In the last few years new design approaches such as demand based control of lab air change rates, chilled beams (hydronic cooling), and VAV exhaust fan control have been successfully employed to safely reduce these lab airflows to as low as 2 ACH to cut energy consumption significantly. Although these concepts may been discussed individually in the past, this talk provides a holistic discussion of how these and other energy saving technologies such as heat recovery can be combined to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.  Several case studies will be provided as well as the results of a sophisticated lab energy analysis tool to determine potential energy and capital cost savings for a typical lab building.

Building a Net Zero Lab in the United Arab Emirates: Mission Impossible?

Laboratories with their intense use of outside air and safety concerns are one of the most challenging building types to achieve net zero.  In fact, some might say it can’t be done at least for many climates. However, a path does exist to achieve net zero energy or at least near net zero using multiple technologies such as VAV lab and exhaust fan control, demand based control of ACH’s, chilled beams or hydronic cooling, and heat recovery. This seminar will explore this topic from a holistic viewpoint and provide a detailed review of an actual case study of a large near net zero lab project in Abu Dhabi,  UAE.

Making Buildings Smarter to Maintain their Energy Efficiency Entitlement

Many highly sustainable commercial buildings as well as complex facilities such as laboratories often use sophisticated control systems to increase their energy efficiency. Unfortunately facility maintenance staffs are often overtaxed and don’t have time to analyze building system performance. As a result control systems degrade and building energy use typically rises over time. This talk will describe the use of intelligent agent systems to analyze a wide range of real time building data including HVAC system performance and indoor environment data to alert operators to system degradation and problems that cut energy efficiency. Sometimes referred to as real time or monitoring based commissioning, these analytical systems often use dashboards and other very graphical visualization methods. The result is a practical and simpler means to ensure buildings realize their energy efficiency entitlements and provide a healthier indoor environment not just for when the building is opened, but over the full life of the building.