Green Cleaning: Steam Cleaning in Manufacturing and Food/Beverage Processing

In our recent blog, we discuss not only the history of steam cleaners, but more importantly we talk about the emergence of dry vapor steam cleaners within the US market.

In the post, Green Cleaning: The History of Steam Cleaners, we explain that dry vapor cleaning is an economical, eco-friendly and effective form of cleaning. At Goodway, we’re finding that these cleaners are particularly useful to the manufacturing and food/beverage processing industries.

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Green Cleaning: The History of Steam Cleaners

Steam cleaning has been used for more than 150 years as a way to remove grease and oil from machinery, primarily on railways, ships, car/truck engines and on power stations.

In the 1960s-1970s, Italian boiler manufacturers purportedly started experimenting with steam vapor as a cleaning method. The steam vapor cleaning method was embraced by European manufacturers more than 30 years ago when they realized the potential cleaning power of highly pressurized, low moisture steam.

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Green Building: The FTC’s Revised Green Guides and What They Mean for Marketers

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently released a revised version of its Green Guides to help marketers ensure that their claims concerning the environmental attributes of their products are based on truth.

As more American consumers look to buy environmentally friendly, or “green” products, companies have responded by offering products they claim have environmental benefits. The guides are the FTC’s attempt at eliminating unsubstantiated or misleading environmental claims.

But sometimes what the company means in its claims and what the consumer understands those claims to mean are totally different. This is where the FTC steps in to help marketers avoid making claims that could be misleading.

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Building Energy Efficiency: ASHRAE’s Economizer Requirements and the Effect on Facilities

Within the year, ASHRAE 90.1 – 2010, the new energy standard for buildings, will become part of commercial building codes in the US. The new standard contains many changes from the 2007 edition that will affect the design, construction and operation of buildings.

One important change is that a cooling system with a cooling capacity of greater than 54,000 Btu/h must have an air economizer or a water economizer.

The only areas exempt from following the economizer requirement are the southernmost tip of Florida and some southern parts of Arizona because the climates in these areas are not favorable for economizing, according to the James M. Pleasants Company (JMPCO), a manufacturer of products and solutions for energy efficient water and steam systems.

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Building Energy Efficiency: Building Performance via Energy Harvesting

If you’re a facility manager who’s concerned about building performance, you would do well to consider energy harvesting.

Early last year, the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies listed wireless power (aka energy-harvested power) in its top 10 technologies that would have the “greatest impact on the state of the world in 2012,” according to an article in Facilitiesnet.

Whether that statement is true or not has yet to be shown, but the value of energy harvesting can’t be ignored.

Energy harvesting pulls from available resources. We’ve seen this concept used in past years with windmills, water wheels and other systems.

But what’s new on the forefront is micro-electromechanical technologies, or micro-size energy harvesters, which harvest energy on a smaller scale. In turn the harvested energy is used to power sensors and other devices.

As with other similar energy-harvesting technology systems, the energy is used immediately or stored in batteries or capacitors for when it’s needed. No outside power source is required in this system and energy that would have been wasted is not.

Not easily convinced about the benefits of energy harvesting?

In her article, Energy Harvesting Increasingly Key for Smart Building Rollouts, ZDNet columnist Heather Clancy highlights some of the emerging technologies.

For example, she notes that the company EnOcean, which has been around since 1990, has launched battery-less wireless modules that are powered by heat generated from such things as machinery parts, radiators and the human body.

EnOcean’s co-founder and vice president of product management, Armin Anders, explains where heat is generated and why it’s useful. “You find differences of temperature in diverse environments: in manufacturing, in heated and air-conditioned premises, through solar radiation, on motors and engines and even on human themselves,” he says. “That makes heat an ideal extra energy source for our self-powered wireless modules.”

One drawback, though, might be cost. The wireless sensors can cost more than the sensors with batteries, according to Clancy’s article. But the installation cost may be lower since an electrician doesn’t need to pull wires. In the end, then, the costs of the wireless sensors and the costs of the battery-operated sensors are probably about the same.

Are you convinced this small technology has larger implications that you shouldn’t overlook?

Next Steps:

• Subscribe to our blog to receive the full blog series via email and stay informed about the latest HVAC news and insight.
• Stay up to date on facility maintenance tools such as chiller tube cleaners, boiler tube cleaners, hose/pipe cleaners, descaler systems, industrial vacuums, commercial pressure washers, and drain cleaners.

HVAC, Building Energy Efficiency: Sometimes it’s the People

We’ve previously talked about building performance in other blog posts, discussing such concepts as smart buildings, data loggers and energy benchmarking.

But it’s also important to spend some time focusing on occupant engagement.

The reason: “[E]ven in the most advanced, forward thought, state-of-the-art green building initiatives, occupants account for up to 50 percent of consumption rates,” according to an article in EDC Magazine.

Despite our highly intelligent building automation systems and all the other innovations, occupants still control half of a building’s energy usage. So the goal is not only building these sophisticated systems, but engaging occupants so they change their behaviors to align with the systems’ performance goals.

YR&G Sustainability’s Principal, Josh Radoff, says it’s critical to lay a groundwork of transparency. He says occupants must understand performance goals and their importance or they won’t be invested in meeting these goals.

Paula Melton tells an interesting story in Environmental Building News.

It seems small indicator lights are used above windows in a LEED Platinum test-bed facility that’s owned by the Syracuse Center of Excellence – small green and red lights far above eye level.

The lights are part of a building maintenance system that provides the information needed to maximize energy efficiencies and optimize indoor air quality to let building occupants know when outside conditions are favorable for natural ventilation, controlling the amount of artificial lighting, and managing the blind controls to reduce glare and heat.

The green lights glow on warm days – days when opening a window or two would increase the comfort level in the facility.

But when the sun goes down and the temperature drops, the red lights burn brightly, indicating that opening the windows really isn’t a good idea.

The red and green lights alert the occupants when it’s best to open windows based on measurements of outdoor temperature, humidity, air quality, and wind speeds.

Like everyone else, though, when building scientists get hot, they open windows. And they keep them open to let in the cool evening air.

The problem is that most of the people in the building – researchers conducting energy and indoor environmental quality experiments – either don’t notice the lights turning red or they don’t understand why they keep changing.

And they don’t understand that if they open windows when the lights turn red, the HVAC system automatically shuts down.

But this story has a happy ending, the author notes.

The building manager and information coordinator, Tim Benson, tells the building’s occupants what the lights are and why they’re important for meeting the building’s performance goals. Now, the occupants understand that when the red lights glow, they aren’t to open the windows.

This case demonstrates the importance of occupant engagement.

“The lights didn’t serve their original purpose until building occupants learned how to interpret and respond to them – that is, until occupants were engaged,” Melton says.

Radoff gives us more insight into the subject of occupant engagement in the white paper, Engaging Building Occupants to Improve Sustainability Performance.

Radoff contends that intentions don’t always equate to results.

If a building owner invests in an energy-efficient, LEED-certified building, he most likely expects the building to use a certain amount of energy.

However, the actual performance data might not live up to the building owner’s expectations, especially once there are people living or working in the building.

Occupant behavior has a greater effect on the building’s performance than people might think. A building performance program is only effective if it’s used properly and takes the building’s occupants into consideration.

In an upcoming post, we’ll tell you more about how to overcome the hurdles to successful occupant engagement.

Next Steps:

• Subscribe to our blog to receive the full blog series via email and stay informed about the latest HVAC news and insight.
• Stay up to date on facility maintenance tools such as chiller tube cleaners, boiler tube cleaners, hose/pipe cleaners, descaler systems, industrial vacuums, commercial pressure washers, and drain cleaners.

Supermarkets Sold on Ammonia as a Refrigerant

Richard Heath, a senior manager for the Supervalu/Albertsons line of grocery stores, says his company’s ammonia-based refrigeration system is “operating like a champ.”

The ammonia refrigeration system was one of the first to be installed in the United States. The grocery chain has implemented the technology in one of its stores in Caprinteria, California, Heaths says in an article in Supermarket News. “For anyone who’s concerned about ammonia, many of the hurdles we were afraid of turned out not to be hurdles at all,” he adds.

Ammonia, like other natural refrigerants (propane, carbon dioxide, and other gases), have little or no effect on global warming or the ozone, according to the Supermarket News article. Because of their “gentle touch” on the environment, they are being looked at as replacements for R-22 and HFCs – each known to have a negative impact on the ozone layer and global warming – for use in chiller tubes, air conditioner coils and cooling towers.

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Green Building and The Built Environment

The push for more green buildings is focused on the use of intelligent controls to monitor and manage lighting, HVAC, security and fire, all with the intent to lower energy costs, according to an article in Forbes.com.

William Pentland, the author of the Forbes article, points to a comment by Richard Gollis of the Concord Group to back up his statement: “Green development no longer simply represents an environmentally friendly label, but instead constitutes a new technology that has the capability to create larger profit margins for real estate.”

Both small and large companies like Johnson Controls, BuildingIQ and JouleX are taking advantage of this push for integrated building management controls as well as introducing new technologies into the market.

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A Greener Choice: Ammonia as a Refrigerant

Supermarkets are high energy users, with more than half of their energy usage attributed to refrigeration, according to an article in Environmental Protection.

The online publication points to a paper from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that puts the average supermarket energy usage at 1 million to 1.5 million kWh per year. Compare that to the 11,040 kWh an average home uses per year. High energy usage, particularly with some of the older technologies, leads to more wear and tear on our ozone layer, according to the article.

The EPA’s GreenChill partnership program works with supermarkets and other food retailers to reduce refrigerant emissions by making operational changes, investing in new systems and focusing more intensely on leak prevention. Retailers showing the most improvement in energy efficiency initiatives are recognized yearly by the EPA. The most recent awards ceremony was held in early September.

Newer stores have the upper hand in emissions reductions as they can use newer refrigeration systems. Many of these newer stores offer technologies not available when the GreenChill program originally started.

Ammonia is part of a group of natural refrigerants, similar to propane, carbon dioxide and other gases, that is showing more use throughout the industry in, according to Supermarket News. These gases have little impact on global warming and don’t harm the ozone layer.

While ammonia has been used less in the past because of health hazards as well as its smell, the newer technologies are making ammonia use safer in chiller tubes, air conditioner coils and cooling towers. Ammonia is becoming a potential replacement for other refrigerants, such as R-22, which are known to harm the ozone and affect global warming harshly.

Keilly Witman, a representative for the EPA’s GreenChill program, spoke last spring at the Food Marketing Institute Expo about ammonia and other natural refrigerants dominating the food retail industry, according to Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration News.

“In the U.S. supermarket industry, misconceptions of ammonia (R-717) and the codes that govern it, coupled with a lack of knowledge pertaining to the systems, serve as major hurdles that will need to be cleared before ammonia can be accepted as a viable alternative to traditional halocarbon refrigerants,” says Caleb Nelson of CTA Architects speaking at the International Institute of Ammonia Refrigeration’s annual conference in 2012.

In the same speech Nelson explains that ammonia has been used safely and efficiently for years in other industries around the world. The initial cost and training can be substantial, but they’re only temporary. And the issues with ammonia use are no different that the issues faced in using other natural refrigerant technologies.

Next Steps:

• Read Ammonia As a Refrigerant: Pros and Cons, one of our most popular posts.
• Read Ammonia As a Refrigerant: Pros and Cons Follow Up, a follow-up to the popular post.
• Subscribe to our blog to receive the full blog series via email and stay informed about the latest HVAC news and insight.
• Stay up to date on facility maintenance tools such as chiller tube cleaners, boiler tube cleaners, hose/pipe cleaners, descaler systems, industrial vacuums, commercial pressure washers, and drain cleaners.

 

Threat to Water Utilities: Aging Infrastructure

Philadelphia has recently been hit with proof that its aging water infrastructure has some serious problems, according to Philly.com.

A 100-year-old water main broke open, flooding streets and homes, and causing evacuations throughout the city. Officials, however, can’t pinpoint the exact cause of the break. But Mayor Michael Nutter has been working with other officials to proactively request more money through grants or other sources from the federal government for infrastructure projects.

In the article, Nutter explains the city does the best it can with the resources it has to inspect and improve the water mains, but with more financing officials would be able to do more. Philadelphia’s water system is about 70 years old and the water main that broke has been used since 1916. The city is raising water rates by 28.5% to cover the necessary repairs as well as improvements to the aging system.

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