Philadelphia’s Navy Yard, which had been a U.S. Naval base for 120 years, is now a center for energy-efficient building technology, including HVAC retrofits. Last year, the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster (GPIC) was awarded government funding to use the Navy Yard to tackle the challenge of how to design, construct and retrofit commercial and residential buildings for energy efficiency.

The Navy Yard, a mixed-use campus featuring historic buildings, corporate headquarters, parks, residential areas, and a Naval research center, will act as a proving ground. Within 10 years, the GPIC aims to deploy technologies, tools and methods for increasing the energy efficiency of commercial buildings by 50 percent.

The GPIC is focusing on supporting retrofits to office buildings, hospitals and apartments in the surrounding 10-county area of southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. To get the biggest bang per buck, they are concentrating on building-retrofit methods with a return on investment of less than three years.

The GPIC encourages those in the retrofit business to look at buildings as entire systems. It recognizes that an important step toward energy efficiency is to integrate the various systems that use energy, such as lighting, electrical, plumbing and HVAC.

Rather than just developing energy-efficient building technologies, the GPIC understands the urgency of getting the technologies into the marketplace quickly. “There’s probably no national solution to getting more commercial building retrofits under way,” says one GPIC leader, Mark Alan Hughes. “You really have to go to a particular place, a particular climate … and try to get traction there.”

The economic benefit of a commercial building retrofit wave across the area could be huge, creating thousands of jobs in this region alone over the next decade. Additionally, energy savings would increase profits and reduce expenses for landlords and tenants, keeping more money in the area.

Do you see a wave of retrofits coming in your area? Is your HVAC company involved in commercial building retrofits? with the economy still teetering, do you see retrofits becoming a larger part of your business? We’d love to hear from you.

As demand for energy expands and prices increase, geothermal heat pumps (GHPs) attract more attention.  It’s inevitable that more customers will approach your HVAC company for installation. GHPs provide only about 1% of U.S. residential heating/cooling, but the market seems poised to grow. And customer satisfaction with existing units is high – around 95%, according to some surveys.

GHPs are a reliable option for residential, commercial, and institutional HVAC needs. Because they are mechanically simple, and the outdoor portion of the system is sheltered underground, maintenance costs tend to be lower. While they are more costly than traditional units, they can produce markedly lower energy bills – 30-60% lower, according to the EPA. Plus, they offer additional sales opportunities to the ever increasing “green” market consumer.

Some fuel-burning heater can reach efficiencies around 95%, but a geothermal heat pump can move up to 4 units of heat for every unit of electricity needed to power the system, resulting in a practical efficiency of over 400%. One of the ways this is accomplished is through higher heat exchange efficiency becauese the water being used is at a constant temperature.  In addition, GHP system lifespan can reach 25 years for the inside components and up to 50 years for the ground loop.

Much of this is still relatively new to the general market, so we will see if there numbers hold up. I’m sure there are a lot of variables involved.

A GHP (more accurately known as a ground source heat pump) uses the nearly constant temperatures found just beneath the earth’s surface as a thermal source to provide heating and cooling. If you’ve ever been in a cave, you know that the below-the- ground temperature is warmer than the air above it during the winter and cooler than the air above it in the summer.

GHPs are reliable in even the coldest climates. During seasonal extremes, temperatures below the ground’s surface rarely fall below 45 degrees or rise above 75. In fact, those temperatures generally hover around 55 degrees. In contrast, air source heat pumps have to work harder to deal with wildly fluctuating air temperatures.

The GHP’s heat exchanger is a loop of high density polyethylene pipe. The most common setup is the horizontal closed loop system, with piping buried in trenches 4-6 feet deep. A vertical closed loop system generally feeds piping through 4-inch diameter holes drilled about 20 feet apart and 100–400 feet deep.

The piping is filled with a solution that absorbs, or rejects, heat. In the winter, the fluid in the pipes extracts heat from the earth and carries it into the building. In the summer, the system reverses and takes heat from the building, using the ground as a heat sink. The warmed or cooled air is distributed through ductwork or hydronic, radiant floor tubing.

GHPs equipped with a device called a “desuperheater” can also heat household water. In summer, heat taken from the house heats the water for free. In the winter, water heating costs are reduced by about half. This co-generation option is very interesting.

Geoexchange.org is the website and directory for the Geothermal Heat Pump Consortium and has excellent information on heat pumps.

I’d be interested to know your experiences with geothermal heat pump systems. Are they becoming a significant part of your HVAC business? Do your customers like them? Do you?

We’ve got good news and, well, ugly news.

The DOE released a winter weather and heating cost forecast in October.

The good news is that the average American will enjoy a slightly warmer winter, which means we’ll buy less fuel than last winter.

And the bad news? Prices for natural gas, and particularly heating oil, have risen, so heating our homes will cost us more this year.

Of course, the forecast isn’t uniform across the country. The DOE projects a 1% decrease in the consumption of fuel here in the Northeast. But fuel prices rose dramatically. The whopping 10% increase in the price of heating oil means users will pay an average of $198 more this heating season. Only 6% of U.S. households depend on heating oil, but 80% of these users live in the Northeast. It might be a great time to upgrade your heating system if you’re still using heating oil. Or you could move.

Oh, and sorry about the forecast for the West. The DOE says you’re on track to have a 3% colder winter season. Even though your price for natural gas is likely to be lower this year, your expenditures will be steady, or slightly up.

It’s a mixed bag for the South. You’re expected to have a 5% warmer winter (how is that fair?), but your heating costs will depend largely on your fuel. Natural gas prices are up 10% in the South, leading to a 6% increase in your probable costs this winter, but electric users can expect to pay nearly 2% less than last year.

Lucky Midwesterners get off easy this year, with a warmer winter and only slight price increases – they may see no increase in heating costs.

It amazes me that the DOE can provide winter weather predictions so early in the season. Now, if they could just help out with my fantasy football.

Recently I’ve been pondering the continue convergence of plumbing and HVAC. You see it everywhere. Many plumbers have added, HVAC to their trucks, while a few HVAC guys have added some plumbing services. What got me going on this was a new product we’ve developed called the Bucket Descaler. It’s designed to clean tankless heaters. If your interested in it check it out.

But that’s not the point of this post. The real point is that the whole tankless market seems a bit lost. Who’s realm is it? The plumber, the HVAC guy or both? What about maintenance vs. installs? These things need annual maintenance flushes. Who’s taking care of that for the homeowner (and grabbing some PM revenue too?).

I recently posed the question on a LinkedIn group called HVAC professionals and the answers were interesting. A few said it was a plumbers domain because it’s domestic heat. Others said it was open territory. Still others said tankless wasn’t a worthy technology to even discuss. To me, many missed the point.

When you install a tankless, or tanked unit for that matter you do it once every X years. Install done. Revenue achieved. Bam, done. But as a service company, how could you maximize the revenue on the unit you just installed while delivering excellent customer service and customer piece of mind? Oh yes, offer a preventative maintenance (PM) program.

To the HVAC contractor this should be a piece of cake. Your company is built around PM, or at least a large part of it. Offering additional services like a tankless unit flush or tanked hot water heater purge is a no-brainer, plus you are generally at your customers place twice a year for HVAC PM. Wouldn’t you want to add an incremental service there? If your answer is yes, annual flushes of hot water heaters, more specifically tankless hot water heater annual maintenance is a gift. What are your thoughts?