The Forest Hills Public Schools Community and Aquatic Center in Forest Hills, MI, needed to replace two aging 24-ton dehumidifiers for its 12,000-sq-ft natatorium.
When the school year kicks off each year in late summer, it’s not unusual for temperatures in many parts of the country to soar into the 90s, which can make it difficult for students to concentrate and be productive.
This month’s Facility File will focus on the B2B April test for an HVAC application within a high school facility, with the existing field house HVAC system being retrofitted to serve as an emergency shelter building with its associated locker rooms and toilet facilities.
There is universal agreement that homo sapiens, or humans, are at the top of the food chain because of our big brains. The downside is big brains are big drains.
The town of Portsmouth, RI, had four schools (two elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school) with outdated, inefficient gas-fired hot water boilers that were becoming expensive to maintain and operate.
A Tennessee district faced an old school HVAC challenge: aging ventilators and space constraints. So this team tried a new-school variation on common VRF retrofits to deliver improved efficiency and critical IAQ: they decentralized the outdoor air, combining enthalpy wheel and VRF components within a single classroom enclosure.
Engineers retrofitting non-air conditioned schools to variable refrigerant flow (VRF) the last few years have relied on centralized packaged DOAS to comply with ASHRAE 62.1 outdoor air standards.
Why do ground loops in moist soils sometimes perform better than expected? What ground loop design tactics can address building system imbalance? Engineers need to take more responsibility for their full GSHP designs, and these questions are a good place to start.
With a little guidance on ground-source heat pump design temperatures and a few rules of thumb for ground loop flow rates, most engineers are pretty comfortable designing the building side of a ground-source heat pump (GSHP) system.