Energy Conservation

oilwizard

Question:
Building owner comes up to you and says I have 3 buildings, one is steam an dtwo are hot water. I want you to give me ideas on how to save energy. Boilers are gas or oil or gas/oil combos. All HB Smiths 28 except two are cleaver brooks fire tubes. One building is rooftop units w/ hot water coils. What would be some ideas you would give him.
Just shout them out, big or small. This could be fun.
Joe

JeffD

Turn off the heat:-) Just kidding. Programmable and lockable thermostats, having tennants pay for their heat, as all to often if the heat is included in the rental cost they are sure to get their money back from the greedy landlord. I take care of several rental units and after I suggested that they reduce the rent in exchange for the tenants paying for their own oil, the usage dropped by about a third. Tenants no longer jacked the thermostats up to 80º. The landlord also agreed to replace old windows with new and to update the heating equipment. Everyone won here, tenants paid less rent, a lot of energy gets saved, and landlord doesn't have the hassle of rising fuel costs.

Jim Davis_3

Having worked in the past with energy auditors and in house boilers operators on thousands of these type of equipment the first thing I suggest is a combustion analysis and then see how the operating controls are set. I have found on commercial heating boilers the control settings alone can offer 15% to 25% savings. Once you know proper operating parameters and settings not only can you calculate savings in advance, but you should use these numbers to estimate what you can charge to do it. I once told a contractor to charge $750 each to tune two 3,750,00 BTU Air Rotation units after the initial combustion analysis. Both were tuned in less than one hour total. Some would think charging $1500 dollars for an hours work is high. But not after the customer saved over $25,000. We only promised $10,000 to $15,000. We did offer to do it for free for 50% of the savings but the customer got worried that we might actually know what we were doing.