Boiler Control Systems – Why they matter even for Small Buildings.
The cost of energy to run large heating systems like those found in office buildings, schools, apartment complexes, government buildings, and industrial buildings can constitute some of the highest expenses in your P&L statement, coming right off your bottom line. For building managers, it’s a never-ending balance between keeping your residents or work area’s comfortable, without paying too much for energy. As such it has become essential that building operations managers implement technology and systems that reduce these costs without compromising on comfort. With utility bills running into the tens of thousands of dollars a month, even a fairly small percentage decrease in heating costs can quickly pay for the cost of installation of a modern boiler control system. But what about the manager of smaller, say 20-unit garden apartment, with a single boiler in the boiler room? Will the hassle and expense of installing a commercial heating control be worth it? How will they ever install it in my old building? My boiler already has built in energy management controls and outdoor temperature monitoring, why do I need more than that? It’s all about Return on Investment (ROI) In the northern half of the country, heating costs can consume anywhere from 60 to 90% of your overall energy bill, especially during a cold winter, or older buildings with older boiler equipment or inefficient heating configurations. But in 2022, heating control manufacturers like Heat-Timer® have introduced systems that address the problems of retrofit, wireless integration, internet and mobile control, as well as maximizing heating efficiency. Modern Heating Control systems like the Heat-Timer® Platinum Series, utilizes wireless space sensors to detect building temperatures and learns the heat-loss profile of your building. The control uses this information to carefully control one or more boilers and to anticipate demand and improve heating efficiency over time. State of the art heating controls like the Heat-Timer® Platinum, cost a small fraction of what the energy savings will be over time, even in a small building. Studies have shown that a Heat-Timer® Platinum series control with space feedback can save anywhere from 15% to 30% more on fuel costs than a high efficiency boiler with just an onboard outdoor reset control, running on its own. That’s because without the ability to get temperature feedback from inside the building(units), the adjustments a standalone boiler makes in firing are coarse, and ultimately limited. We have seen many a super simply bypass the boiler control due to complaints from residents, making the boiler/s operation even less efficient. Without direction from a smart control that actually knows what’s going on with temperatures throughout the building, the so-called “smart boiler,” will fail to satisfy the human factors associated with heat management. Save Money, Be Green While this has been all about maximizing energy savings, there’s more to to be gained by implementing a state-of-the-art heating control system. The environmental benefits are significant, as is any investment that reduces energy usage. This in turn lowers emissions and waste, contributing to a lower carbon footprint. Then there’s another kind of green benefit: government subsidies. To offset the initial investment of introducing energy efficient heating systems to your buildings, there are often state and federal rebates to support these types of eco-friendly investments because they take pressure off the energy grid and are part of various state run “green” initiatives. Like New York City’s Local Law 97 which legally requires your commercial building to reduce its carbon footprint over the next several years. Motivating, isn’t it? Heating Control Systems By Heat Timer® With energy prices skyrocketing, it has become easier than ever to justify the cost of a modern heating control system, whether your building is large or small. Call your local Commercial HVAC contractor today. And ask them about Heat-Timer® Or contact us directly. For questions or information visit https://heat-timer.com Original blog posted on https://www.heat-timer.com/boiler-control-systems-why-they-matter-even-for-small-buildings/
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In the face of a worldwide push to keep increases in global temperatures below 2C, NYC is doing its part through the passage of Local Law 97. The purpose of LL97 is to reduce NYC’s carbon emissions in its largest buildings by 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050.
The new law directly affects owners of both commercial and residential buildings over 25000 sq ft. in size including rent controlled buildings with less than 35% rent regulated units. Comprehensive information on LL97 can be found at the New York State website. It is the responsibility of every building owner or manager for directly understanding whether their buildings are affected and if so, ensuring they comply. What do you need to do? If you have determined that your building is affected by Local Law 97 you will have to file an annual Greenhouse gas emissions report. This report will explain the building status with respect to LL97 and if your building exceeds the maximum allowable greenhouse gas emission level, you will be subject to an annual penalty. This penalty will be based on a direct calculation of the difference between allowed carbon emissions and actual carbon emissions. For large building owners, these fines can easily be thousands of dollars or even tens of thousands of dollars if non-compliance is significant. A property manager can find out if their building complies with the upcoming 2024-2029 emissions caps, or the much tougher 2030-2034 caps, today. For the most part the buildings covered by this new law have already been subject to New York benchmarking laws LL84, and LL133, so property managers have been required to calculate and report energy and water usage to the city for several years now. With the data collected from the benchmarking surveys the property manager can use an online Carbon Emissions Calculator to determine if they comply. How Heat-Timer® Helps NYC Building Owners Comply. To put it simply: reducing greenhouse gasses means reducing energy usage, period. If you can reduce your heating energy usage by ½ or more you will have gone a long way toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions and complying with Local Law 97. Heat-Timer® products help with this in two primary ways: Reduction of Heating costs – For large apartment or office buildings, the installation of an internet enabled Heat-Timer® Platinum control has been shown to reduce energy consumption by anywhere from 25% to 50%. Even apartments with older Platinum controls can upgrade them to internet based wireless controls without having to purchase a new control. With the addition of just these capabilities and the use of our wireless space sensors, similar reductions in energy consumption are possible. The best part is that rebate programs offered by NY Utility companies will often pay for part or most of your equipment and installation costs. Compliance With The New Minimum Apartment Temperature Requirements – The following notice is posted on the NYC website at the start of every heating season: “The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) today announces the beginning of New York City’s eight-month-long “heat season,” during which all residential building owners are required to maintain indoor temperatures at 68 degrees when outdoor temperatures fall below 55 degrees during the day. Indoor temperatures must also be a minimum of 62 degrees overnight, regardless of outdoor temperatures.” This can be a very difficult area to stay in compliance with because building owners to not have ready access to temperature readings to head off complaints. Many times they will need staff to enter apartments for temperature testing with a thermal gun, but many times the call to 311 has already been made. This challenge can be made much easier with the addition of wireless apartment sensors communicating to your remote operable Heat-Timer®. Not only will the sensors provide the feedback you need to validate or invalidate a heating complaint in real time, but they will also allow you to go back as far as (13) months into the past to chart and track the temperature of any temperature sensor. In practical terms, the wireless sensors will also allow the end user to set a smart ambient average command for both daytime and nighttime that the Heat-Timer® will maintain, allowing building owners to satisfy heating needs of cooler apartments, while overheating others as little as possible. In doing so, the Heat-Timer® also reduces boiler run times, and overall heating expenditures. More efficient Domestic Hot Water Delivery – Heat-Timer® Products help building owners provide the most energy efficient operational compliance with NYC law possible. Products like our Electronic Tempering valve or our pre-plumbed Electronic tempering station make a lot of sense even without the added motivation of LL97 driven energy savings. This is because landlords in NYC are subject to heating and hotwater rules established by the city housing department, which direct allowable temperatures of water delivery during heating season. From the actual spec we have the following: “Building owners are legally required to provide hot water at 120 degrees year-round. The Heat-Timer ETV Platinum Plus can also be upgraded for remote access for real time temperature readings and real time alarming if the DHW temps fall out of compliance, both high or low.” Let’s face it: building managers hate to get on the city’s radar and those 311 calls have ruined many an owner’s weekend. With Heat-Timer’s domestic hot water controls and remote boiler controls minding the store, most of these issues can be prevented and resident comfort can be maintained. For more information on how you can obtain rebates that offset the cost of Heat-Timer® equipment and installation, please call our team today. Original content posted on https://www.heat-timer.com/what-is-nyc-local-law-97-and-how-do-i-comply/ For other USA based manufacturers like Heat-Timer, the departure of 2021 is certainly a mixed blessing. While we did not collectively put COVID concerns in the rear view mirror as hoped, we all nevertheless found a way to manage our businesses safely, and keep the greater US economy largely humming.
At Heat-Timer® we are driven by the market’s desire to save money on heating bills and boiler maintenance. That pretty much describes everything we build, and why we build it. It turns out that this need doesn’t change so much in the middle of a pandemic, in fact a renewed focus on the bottom line has been nothing but motivating for many new customers who decided in 2021 that taking the plunge on the worlds most sophisticated heating control, was an investment worth making. In 2021, Heat-Timer did not rest on it’s laurels either. We took the plunge too with renewed focus on updating our products and our product line in response to market feedback and better operational efficiency. We solidified our status as a USA based manufacturer and did not suffer the supply chain woes of so many of our competitors who are building their controls offshore. Generally speaking, we’re quite excited about what we accomplished in 2021 and we think our customer base will be excited about it in 2022 and beyond, stay tuned. In a year like 2021 however, no discussion would be complete without a huge thank you to our loyal client base. Heat-Timer® made many new friends in 2021, and old friends came to us for internet upgrades that improved their bottom line even more. These tried and true heating professionals don’t even consider other heating controls, and they continue to be our best advocates out in the field when it comes to commercial, internet based heating solutions. We thank them for caring and for carrying our message forward to new applications all over the country. We wish everyone a very happy 2022 and a sincere wish for health and prosperity for us all. The original blog posted on https://www.heat-timer.com/2021-thanks-for-the-memories/ As HVAC professionals begin getting their sleepy boilers ready for the upcoming heating season, they know that the first few weeks can be hectic, as dormant boilers are lit and unexpected startup problems pop up all over. It’s typically a time with some long days and a steady stream of calls from residents and building operators.
Professionals who’ve been doing this for a while, know that even if a boiler has been professionally inspected and serviced during the summer months, idle heating systems are still susceptible to both sediment and corrosion. Sediment settles out of the cold motionless water and compacts in pumps and valves, and of course as Mr. Young famously said, “rust never sleeps.” The physics of heating system inactivity conspires to create a rich set of winter startup problems for commercial heating professionals. As a premiere manufacturer of advanced heating control systems, the experts at Heat-Timer® have seen their share of these startup problems, and taught building managers a few tricks for using our controls and room sensors to diagnose these issues. 1. Preventing Pump Problems. Because of this summer’s accumulation of sediment and rust, pumps are one of the first things that a technician checks when they turn on the boiler. Often a pump won’t start because the impeller is embedded in sediment. If the pump does start, it may leak through dried out seals. This often leads to a pump disassembly, cleaning and rebuild, or full pump replacement. This expensive fall pump ritual can be prevented with a little exercise. A pump lead lag controller like the Heat-Timer® PLL can exercise boiler pumps by running them for a short period every week during the off-season, keeping seals wet and flushing out sediment. The Heat Timer® PLL also has low flow alarms which when interfaced to a Platinum series controller, can alert the boiler service company or building manager that there is a pump failure at any time during the heating season. Often these problems can be diagnosed and resolved without a visit to the boiler room, thanks to our BuildingNet® interface or mobile phone app. 2. Oil Fired Boilers – For oil fired boilers, clogged fuel filters can be another start-up problem as a summer’s accumulation of black sludge is stirred up and sucked into the filter when the oil tank is filled in the fall. This can cause hard to diagnose boiler lockouts as the burner is intermittently starved for fuel unless that oil filter is monitored with a vacuum sensor like Heat Timer’s Oil Filter Monitoring Kit. An oil filter monitor connected to a Platinum controller can give a building manager plenty of warning that a fuel filter needs to be replaced, so that it can be changed at the next regular boiler service, rather than during a late-night emergency call after a boiler lock-out. 3. Plumbing Decay – While pumps and filters are the obvious problem areas during boiler start up because they are right there out in the open, there are invisible problems in the boiler room too. Pipes, condensate tanks and the boilers are eternally and invisibly rusting from the inside out. Boiler tube leaks are common start-up problems on older boilers. Iron pipes can suddenly develop pinhole leaks. Steam traps can fail to close properly. Even when these leaks are as obvious as a puddle on the floor, it can be days before someone goes into the boiler room and notices it. On the other hand a leak from a steam line or steam trap can be hard to see even if a service technician is looking for it, and water leaking from inside the boiler may evaporate and go up the stack, but not before causing further corrosion problems in the burner and the flue ducting. Fortunately, the days (and nights) of discovering water leaks only after the sump pump alarm goes off are long gone. Sensitive boiler feedwater meters connected to BuildingNet® through a Platinum controller continuously measure boiler make-up water usage. Building managers can use BuildingNet’s trending tools to visualize long term changes in boiler water usage week to week or season to season, helping identify water leaks while they are still small and inexpensive to fix rather than after they have flooded the boiler room, shutting down the boiler and damaging equipment. Heat-Timer® Controls Save Money and Maintenance Headaches. There is a lot to keep an eye on in those first few weeks of boiler operation, especially if you are responsible for multiple buildings. Knowing that your boiler controller has your back, monitoring everything going on in the boiler room can make waking up the boilers a lot less stressful. Heat-Timer® has been helping boiler service professionals wake up the boilers for over 80 years with a deep toolkit of controllers, sensors and alarms. If servicing the boilers keep you awake at night, consider upgrading to Heat-Timer’s Platinum controller with a BuildingNet® remote interface. Original content posted on https://www.heat-timer.com/service-your-boilers-before-winter-arrives/ |
AuthorHeat-Timer® corporate office and manufacturing facility is conveniently located in Fairfield, NJ. Here, Heat-Timer® manufactures its electronic controls, sensors, valves and actuator products using specialized computer controlled equipment and automated testing systems. Archives
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