Competitive Landscape - AC Energy Efficiency Measures

Building Energy Efficiency Measures

Most commercial buildings were not designed to be energy efficient. Energy is single largest controllable operating cost, typically around 30% of the building’s variable costs.

Although HVAC is typically the top consumer of electricity consumption, HVAC energy efficiency measures (EEMs) like COOLNOMIX often compete for the same limited funding.

As Covid-19 has reminded us, it is very beneficial to monitor the health and safety of building spaces, including having remote access to indoor buildings condition in real-time (e.g., indoor air quality, thermal comfort, HVAC, energy consumption). Other common non-HVAC EEMs include lighting, plug loads, envelope / windows, other technology, building operations, and building controls.

The most popular non-HVAC EEM in recent years has been LED lighting.  It is important to evaluate the COOLNOMIX opportunity vs. non-HVAC EEMs like LED lighting. For example, a retail bank achieved 3 times the energy consumption reduction from COOLNOMIX vs. LED lighting. This customer completed both projects!

HVAC Energy Efficiency Measures

HVAC preventative maintenance (PM) is the most important HVAC energy efficiency measure. Businesses that do not deploy basic PM will not achieve the manufacturer’s energy efficiency specifications. According to multiple research sources, the energy consumption waste associated with deferred maintenance is over 20% for 80% of the existing buildings.  

Programmable thermostats are also very important, since they provide multiple ways to adjust space heating and cooling equipment, including offering different comfort settings for occupied time vs unoccupied time.  

After PM and programmable thermostats, there are multiple options and deciding what to do next varies based upon the building type, business, climate, and other factors.  If you are measuring energy consumption on an annual basis, the choices are easier because you will have insight into your top energy consumers in your specific use case and you can focus on those.

For sure, ventilation is used year-round, during both heating and cooling. Options that can improve ventilation energy efficiency include economizers that bring in fresh outside air and variable frequency drives (VFDs) that make a motor work at variable speeds.  However, these measures also must be maintained, or they can fail and instead increase energy consumption.  For example, research indicates that more than 60% of the economizers deployed have failed.  Those that have failed open are likely bringing in more warm air that then needs to be cooled.

There is a huge, often overlooked opportunity with the compressor, as it the largest energy consuming component of a HVAC system (50-90% of the total). COOLNOMIX targets the compressor, so energy reductions from deploying COOLNOMIX will typically far outperform other HVAC energy efficiency measures.

Low-Cost Compressor Controller Retrofits

If we think back 20 years, we tried using timers, like we do with lights, to try to optimize run-time but that approach was unable to deliver predictable results.

Later, we started to see technologies that attached to an existing thermostat, read the thermostat sensor readings, and applied AI. That helped a little but was limited to the information from the thermostat sensor only and historical data. 

There are other technologies available that offer a single additional sensor and AI. However, they only deliver results for certain use cases.

The reason that COOLNOMIX has a US patent on a dual sensor system with AI is that is the threshold where you have enough additional sensors to measure the changing demand in the space and can apply AI to respond to rapid demand changes and deliver predictable results.