Actions lead to the expense of energy continues to take a significant part of their operating costs, hasn't time arrived to begin devising new ways of designing and controlling the heating and cooling systems entering condominium buildings? A good starting point is usually to start designing a typical system to serve the complete building as opposed to individual plants for each living unit.
Clearly, the capital reserve study for the condominium association will have to address the new concept. The townhouse configuration offers a good example. Here the look approach is to consider each unit being a small home - five units, five warming systems. You could debate that, given our preference for independence, each homeowner needs to have an inalienable right to control the destiny of their individual comfort level.
However, if the future unit owner have been in around the building design phase and informed that an engineered common heat feeding all units could provide that degree of comfort at reduced future energy costs and also at little to no rise in price, I believe we all know which way the vote would go.
It's commonly understood that boilers operate most efficiently when running at full capacity. Suppose we had an individual, high-efficiency, condensing type boiler properly maintained to perform at about ninety-five percent efficiency. We will allow that common boiler to operate at its rated capacity, supplying warm water to each and every unit's radiation for the ninety of times when it is able to meet the normal demand.
We are going to meter the quantity of heating water supplied to each unit for billing purposes. Every individual unit would also have a small boiler riding on the common system. It'll start to modulate the temperature inside the individual units only if likely to extreme cold snap, thereby satisfying the various inalienable opinions of convenience different owners.
An alternative solution may well be a second common boiler that fires approximately meet infrequent higher demands. The effect could be reduced heating energy costs for the newly defined client - the development, and ultimately each unit owner. An astute developer might consider all this a marketing plus. However, they would have to intentionally steer the design in this direction.
When individuals are motivated to even begin thinking along these lines they need some data that sets a minimum of some general feasibility parameters. What are the comparative costs of individual heating systems versus common systems in specific building configurations? What reductions in operating costs can be expected and an amount the pace of return on your investment be?
Simply how much wouldn't it cost to retrofit a current building? Will be latter cost be factored right into a capital reserve fund plan as a possible improvement? The hardware is in stock. Some work must be carried out system design and (here comes hard part) selling management.
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