Gibbons Engineering Group were pleased to attend the H&V
News round table meeting last week, where the concept of continuous
commissioning of buildings was discussed. We don't want to spoil the surprise
for H&V News readers who will see the full write-up in a forthcoming issue,
but we did leave the event asking ourselves what we consider continuous
commissioning to be and how this directly affects our business within a HVAC
services team.
We believe continuous commissioning means making sure fans,
motors, pumps and air handling systems are operating in the most efficient way.
That's efficient both in terms of providing the right level of comfort to
building occupants, while at the same time consuming the least amount of energy
and having the smallest impact on our environment.
To us, this means an ongoing process of measuring, checking,
validating and of course servicing during a HVAC system’s operation. It also
means continually looking at new technologies to see what impact these could
have on the operation of HVAC plant.
Let's look at an example, taking a fairly typical commercial
building with a mechanical ventilation system using fans. Our engineers work
with the building manager and establishes that the building has maximum
occupancy during the day and just a few people working at night. The building
has been fitted with inverter drives and the commissioning records show that
the fans were able to deliver the specified maximum air requirement when they
were installed. At night, the fans continue to run at full speed even though
the building is under low occupancy. A simple sensor connected either to the
building management system (BMS) or directly to the drive would allow the
inverter drive to receive an auto signal. This would reduce its speed
accordingly, ensuring the correct conditions are achieved for a time of low
building occupancy.
So what impact does this have? Let's assume the user was
able to reduce the speed of the fan by just 20% - they would be saving half of
the power previously being consumed. A significant reduction for a relatively
small change.
This situation is not untypical for our specialist engineers
to find when carrying out surveys of fans within plant rooms. Often the ability
to accurately speed-control a motor is negated during the commissioning/setting
to work process but this can have the biggest effect on operation over its
service life.
The process of ongoing measuring, monitoring, checking and
servicing ensures original commissioning parameters are sustained and for us
this defines what continuous commissioning is all about. It's what we do every
day!
If you have any HVAC systems issues we can help with, call
Andrew Knight on 07850204915, email andrew.knight@gibbonsgroup.co.uk or you can
visit our HVAC Services page for more information.
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