Fans 33 Sick and tired without fans
A CONSEQUENCE OF securing increased energy efficiency from our building stock is that our buildings have become more airtight, writes Alan Macklin, technical director of Elta Group. This has brought an even greater focus on indoor air quality, a point well-illustrated by the HealthVent Project, a European Commission funded initiative which is developing a set of guidelines aimed at ensuring a healthy living, working and learning environment for European citizens.
The results of the project – which began in 2010 – were presented earlier this year by the HealthVent Consortium at the European Parliament in Brussels and made for very interesting reading. Just the headline statistics illustrate what an important issue indoor air quality has become.
In Europe, people are estimated to spend at least 90% of their lifetime
indoors. Research in 26 European countries has shown that diseases attributable to major indoor air exposures are estimated to represent two million healthy life years annually.
Over half of these diseases are due to indoor exposure to pollutants originating outdoors, with the remainder due to pollutants from indoor sources including building materials, furnishing, equipment, consumer products and combustion, as well as the activities of the people that frequent the buildings.
The basic premise of the guidelines is that there should be a shift towards a health-based approach to ventilation which current EU ventilation standards do not support, offering as they do only general guidance to controlling exposure to pollutants based on recommended levels of carbon dioxide and humidity indoors. As fan manufacturers we have only a
small part to play in addressing indoor air quality. However, though our role may be small, it is a vitally important one since fans are at the heart of ventilation systems. We need to be mindful that in developing ever greener buildings, the environmental benefits must not be to the detriment of those for whom they are built.
Efficiency as a balancing act
WITH LEGISLATION AND regulations surrounding fan motors becoming ever more stringent, writes Andrew Saxon, marketing manager at Biddle Air Systems. With the non-domestic sector contributing to 38% of the UK’s carbon emissions, energy-using products installed in commercial, industrial and public sector premises have recently come under close scrutiny, particularly through the ErP (Energy-related Products) Directive, which aims to make energy-consuming products more environmentally sound. Being relatively large consumers of energy, electrically driven fan motors – which are an integral part of air curtains, fan coils and fan convectors – have become an area of focus within the ErP Directive. Since January 2013 fans sold within the EU have needed to comply with the ErP Directive for fans (2011/327/ EC), and have to meet specific efficiency values. And from January 2015, a second stage with higher efficiency values will be introduced.
High efficiency fan motors offer significant benefits – for example, when manufactured with high efficiency EC fan motors, fan coils offer comparatively low energy consumption.
Claims suggest EC fan coil units use up to 70% less energy than traditional products and that an SPF (Specific Fan Power) of 0.3w/ls-1 or lower can be achieved, compared to an SPF of 0.7w/ls-1 for an AC FCU.
They will also operate for twice as long, resulting in lower maintenance costs. Better still, EC FCUs can be coupled with
Visit ACR News online at
www.acr-news.com
intelligent controls, programmers and building management systems to optimise energy efficiency. Biddle of course welcomes the changes that are being made to fan motor efficiencies. However, the increasingly stringent requirements have huge implications for our industry. Our primary concern is that because the fan motors demanded by the ErP Directive are more expensive, this could have serious consequences for manufacturers, end-users and – ironically – the environment.
For manufacturers, the cost
implications are twofold. Firstly, they will be buying a more expensive component, and secondly, because they are essentially adding a different technology to their product that will perform differently, there will be costly modifications and testing/approval procedures to undertake.
Manufacturers can of course choose to absorb these additional costs, but this will be difficult for those already working to very tight margins. In reality, the cost is more likely to be passed onto customers through product price increases. Our worry is that when faced with these additional costs, customers looking to retrofit products will decide not to invest and will instead keep their old, inefficient air conditioning and climate control systems – especially during the economic recovery – so efficiency levels won’t improve and carbon emission reduction targets won’t be met. On new projects the increased cost could be more easily built in, but it might actually lead to
ACR News January 2014
customers deciding against the investment altogether. We can of course talk about payback periods and how a more efficient fan motor will quickly pay for itself in terms of energy savings, but in many cases products are bought by a landlord – who doesn’t pay the energy bills and won’t therefore see any monetary benefit. In this scenario payback figures are essentially meaningless, as the property owner will usually only be interested in the capital cost of the equipment. We are seeing the requirements for fan motors becoming ever more stringent, and while we understand this is necessary, the approach does need to be a sensible, balanced one that takes the added cost into consideration.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44