heating hot water ( HHW ) plants . The client aspires to achieve carbon neutral status within the next 15 years , and one key mandate is the elimination of natural gas for hydronic and domestic hot water heating . For this project , failing steam infrastructure at a particular section of the distribution was the primary motivation for a centralized heating plant to serve a cluster of three buildings . Two of the buildings were constructed circa 1960 , and the third building was constructed within the last five years ( Table 1 ).
+
Building
A
B
C
Table 1 : Existing Building Charateristics
Use
Engineering Classrooms & Labs
Science Classrooms & Labs
Geology & Mathematics Classrooms & Labs
Year Constructed
Bulding Area ( ft 2 )
1962 93,000
2018 110,000
1960 126,000
Recommended practice is to gather available trend data from a facility to benchmark its operation , where upon , providing the data is granular enough , we can dig into the specific systems . For this project , the university had Btu meters installed on the HHW side of the heat exchangers , which enabled us to analyze the actual operation of the system rather than having to rely on the existing equipment capacity or develop a detailed load calculation to size the new plant . Table 2 shows that assuming the existing installed equipment to be sized correctly results in a grossly oversized system with higher capital costs . Such a system is also likely to encounter limitations due to the existing building infrastructure . From a performance perspective , there would be challenges with operating a heat pump system sized for 250 % of the actual peak demand .
The analysis also provided an opportunity to understand other potential issues with the current system operation . As an example , Building A showed a peak heating demand of 27 Btu / h ยท ft 2 ( 85 W / m 2 ) prior to the plant upgrades . This value was not in line with our expectations and data from similar campus buildings .
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