Skip to main content
Tag

hvac systems

Cooling Embedded Data Centers – How To, and Not To

By Energy Rant One Comment
I recently reviewed an energy colonoscopy report aimed at saving energy for a small hospital’s data center – an embedded data center. Many building types can have substantial embedded data center loads including schools, office buildings, banks, and government. Connected data center loads vary from a few kilowatts to perhaps 50 kW. You can do your own research on energy saving opportunities in data centers. Here is one from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab that covers fourteen energy-saving opportunities, but it’s missing one: the giant canacorn custom measure that exists for nearly every embedded data center. My point in this post…
Read More

Energy Audits and Complication Proclivity Syndrome

By Energy Rant No Comments
This week, we continue the discussion of ASHRAE Standard 211, Standard for Commercial Building Energy Audits. For ease of consuming this post, I suggest destroying 1/900,000th of a conifer by printing last week’s post, which includes a super summary of the approach, process, and contents of the three levels of energy audits in one table. The Nerd’s Arms Race One thing is certain regarding human nature: people love to complicate the hell out of things. Consider the tax code, code of federal regulations, and any part or level of government. The private sector follows similarly, maybe with different reasons. For…
Read More

Energy Codes – Bahahaha, You’re Killing Me

By Energy Rant One Comment
Last week’s post for Strategic Energy Management was milquetoast calm and civil. This post will provide more of what many Rant readers crave: brash provocation, with concrete reality to back it up. Here begins the fantasy of energy code effectiveness and compliance. This topic was spawned as I was assessing ACEEE’s 2015 State Energy Efficiency Scorecard, for The Daily, Michaels’ internal daily news blog. The ACEEE state scores are developed from 50 total points, allocated as follows.My comment was/is that points for code enforcement and level of stringency should be reversed; i.e., there should be four points for enforcement and…
Read More

HVAC’s Cure for Cancer

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant 2 Comments
In January, I wrote about code compliance and that while energy codes keep ratcheting down energy intensity in theory, reality is misery.  That post was a thinly veiled advertisement for my AESP National Conference session in the Lion’s Lair, and that presentation can be seen here.  My Lion’s Lair proposal was a thinly veiled pitch to fix what would be the equivalent of curing cancer for commercial HVAC systems. The cancer is the widely used variable, air volume system.  Another boondoggled application of one such system triggered this post.  The boondoggle was part of an evaluation we are doing on…
Read More