SAVE FROM 20-30% ON YOUR MONTHLY AIR CONDITIONING COSTS!

How does the AircoSaver work?

Air conditioning systems are usually dimensioned to cope with the extreme cooling demands of the few hottest days of the year (plus a safety margin). However, in most operational conditions, this maximum output is not required and the system is over-sized.

This is where an AircoSaver comes in. Its sensor-driven software algorithms are designed to detect thermodynamic saturation and to optimize the compressor accordingly. When over capacity is detected, AircoSaver switches the compressor off and avoids inefficient over-cooling (see diagram below).

The set room temperature is reached without the inefficient parts of the cooling cycle.This results in significant energy savings without compromising cooling comfort.

Benefits of an AircoSaver An AircoSaver adds state-of the art intelligence to air-conditioner systems and improves their energy efficiency.

It is a retrofit product to upgrade existing units which can be installed in approx. 15 minutes

Will this work on your air conditioner? Click the Call-Us button to your right to discuss your air conditioner or chiller.

The CNN Money piece titled “Knock $ 4,000 of Your Utility Bill” does a great job of offering simple advice with great payback. Isn’t that what you want? Aren’t you tired of unpractical innovations like a solar powered pocket book, which not only looks goofy, but does nothing to help you save money or reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Many of their simple fixes cost under $ 1,000, some even less than $ 100, but offer payback periods of a year of less. After one year, these fixes become PROFITABLE to you!

Let’s take a look at some here:

• Insulate Attic

Cost: $ 500 – $ 1,000

Payback: $ 500 – $ 1,000 / year

Don’t stop here – this one is one of the most expensive with the slowest payback period. This gets better soon. See the other tips below.

Comment on the recommended Attic Tent, which insulates around attic hatches: Amazon.com sells a more economical alternative called Battic Door. Click here for information and pricing.

• Great Stuff – Insulating Foam

Cost: $ 15.00

Payback: $ 500.00 / year

Comment: Get Great Stuff Insulating Foam from $ 5.33 / bottle by clicking here

• Insulation Jacket on Water Heater

Cost: $ 40.00

Payback: $ 100 /year

Comment: You wouldn’t need to insulate your water heater if you used a tankless water heater, which creates hot water on demand – fast and efficiently. Make it even more efficient by pre-heating your water with a solar powered water heater on your roof. Click here to see more energy efficient home products including high efficiency appliances like refrigerators and washing machines.

• Schedule a Periodic Service Call

Cost: $ 100- $ 200 / year

Payback: $ 300 – $ 500 / year

Comment: Call us for a referral to a good service company in the Mid-Atlantic region: 443-864-3072.

• Cover the Ducts

Cost: $ 50 – $ 250

Payback: $ 500 – $ 1,500 / year

Comment: The all-time favorite fix-it, duct-tape, can delivery an almost unbelievable payback for its cost. Add a little additional cost to purchase duct insulation and you’re done.

• Use Time-Settings for Heat

Cost: $ 40.00 or Free using BG&E’s PeakRewards as explained below

Payback: $ 500 / year

Comment: While a programmable thermostat is a great energy-saving idea when used correctly and can be installed very easily by yourself, you sometimes have to be careful about which type you buy if you own a heatpump. To make matters simpler, and cheaper, if you live in Maryland’s Baltimore Gas & Electric service area, you can contact BG&E to take advantage of their PeakRewards Smart Energy Savers Program. By doing so, Baltimore Gas & Electric will provide you with a new, digital thermostat and free installation. Furthermore, the digital thermostat is programmable over the internet. You enter the settings on a website, and then they are transmitted over radio to your thermostat and automatically programmed to make energy saving so simple that you are more likely to do it. Note that by agreeing to be in the program, you are allowing BG&E to remotely cycle your compressor on and off at their discretion on peak energy emergency days, but BG&E claims they will only use it a few times per summer. This might cause your indoor air to be warmer or more humid, but that shouldn’t matter to families which commute to work during those peak hours. Since BG&E is able to more efficiently manage their peak power usage, their costs decrease. They pass some of this back to you as a rebate for being on the PeakRewards program. You can learn more about PeakRewards and sign up at Baltimore Gas & Electric’s PeakRewards website at:

http://www.bgesmartenergy.com/peakrewards/what-is-peakrewards

Note: Although the PeakRewards program has its benefits, BG&E’s time of day billing has some definite downsides, judging from comments posted by customers on Jay Hancock’s blog.

Sellers offer “Green” Incentive Package to Buyers

Boca Raton, Florida (PRWEB) March 5, 2008 — With headlines reading “Home prices to post another decline in ‘08,” residential home sellers are between a rock and a hard place. In order to set their home apart from the 235 houses on the market in their price range in the Boca Raton, Florida area, Tara and Daniel Biller devised a “green home” incentive plan for potential buyers. They are offering buyers a slew of environmentally friendly upgrades and products including a solar water heater system.

“Tara and Daniel Biller are in the same situation as millions of American’s with a home to sell,” said Torm Martinson, broker/agent for Campbell & Rosemurgy Real Estate. “They’ve lowered their asking price, made home improvements and have been patient waiting for an offer – any offer.”

“We realized it was time to do something different to set our house apart,” commented Tara. “I’m in the process of starting up a residential ‘green home’ consulting service and I have been doing a lot of research on solar panels and outfitting the home with more environmentally friendly solutions. Daniel and I devised this plan to see if this would peak the interest of potential buyers.”

For those that are interested in learning more about the Biller’s home and the “green home” incentive package, please contact Torm Martinson at 561-504-6200, or torm@campbellandrosemurgy.com.

Click Here to Buy Cool-n-Save at Near Wholesale Cost!

In an earlier article, we discussed how air conditioning works.  The important fact from that article is that a water cooling function, such as a cooling tower, increases the efficiency of the condenser to allow for more effective cooling. This is due to the fact that, as water evaporates, it absorbs a great deal of energy (heat) from the surrounding air, making the job of your air conditioner’s cooling coil that much easier.

Why Businesses Save More Energy on Major Appliances

(Image courtesy of: Bryant, Charles W., and Marshall Brain. “How Air Conditioners Work.” 01 April 2000. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://home.howstuffworks.com/ac.htm> 21 May 2008. Please visit their site for a terrific explanation of air conditioning and other systems.)

Even if you could afford a cooling tower, the neighbors would not be too happy about you installing one unless you had a few hundred acres of land in a remote area. The trick is in scaling down the high efficiency cooling systems, or at least the underlying technology, so that it is accessible for you and me.

Scaling Industrial HVAC Technology for the Small Consumer

Luckily, I have been researching, and installed at my own house an extremely affordable solution which utilizes that same principle, which is that the evaporation of water mist draws a large amount of energy from the air in the form of heat, allowing your air conditioner’s condensing coils to cool faster and pump that coolness into your house or small office. I was immediately impressed with the simplicity, and the fact the I installed the device in 15 minutes without using any tools whatsoever. Notice here that it is installed on a residential heat pump, and will work on almost any similar split system air conditioner or heat pump. The important factor is that the condenser (the outside portion of your air conditioning system) is upright and has a fan which blows air upwards through a grate. The top portion of the Cool-n-Save is glued onto the condenser and connected to your home’s outdoor water nozzle with the included plastic tubing. The included filter provides water without small particles which would clog the misters. The top of the Cool-n-Save base contains a paddle (flap) which moves upwards when air is blown from the condenser’s fan as shown above, opening a water valve which sends water down through three plastic tubes. Three misters send a cool, moist mist towards the condenser intake, cooling the ambient air by as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Here we see the Cool-n-Save mister in action, spraying a super fine mist and using a tiny amount of water.

Proving Cool-n-Save Energy Savings

Cool-n-Save Energy Star

Although it is too early to give definitive figures on energy savings, and it will be difficult to compare month-to-month energy bills due to fluctuations in temperature and other variables, I can attest to its ability to reduce the load on my air conditioner and thus cool my home quicker than before. If nothing else, this product increases our comfort level on hot days. Instead of accepting my subjective opinions on the Cool-n-Save, you can download the Cool-n-Save Study by Tulane University for a comprehensive engineering analysis of the device. When in doubt, the Energy Star Partner seal should give you confidence:

Calculate Your Savings

According to Con Edison, the amount of energy used by your air conditioner is a function of outside temperature and thermostat settings, and will range from 50% – 80% of your total energy costs in the summer. How much did you calculate? We conservatively estimated $ 170 per month savings at our home. Would you think it would be fair if Cool-n-Save paid for itself in less than one summer? Before answering, consider other upgrade projects you have completed in your house. Have you installed new windows to improve insulation? The payback period for new windows can run over 10 years! For the Cool-n-Save, let’s use: 3 months x $ 170 savings per month = $ 510 savings in one summer! In our situation, Cool-n-Save is paying for itself in 2-3 weeks! Plus, we noticed our house reached a comfortably cool temperature much quicker, even on the hottest, most humid days! If the Cool-n-Save cost only $ 100.00, then it will be EARNING you money for 2-1/2 months of the summer, or even longer in hot, southern-US States. $ 170 savings per month x 2.5 months = $ 425 PROFIT you made this summer by using an energy efficiency device!

Buy Cool-n-Save Below Retail Price!

For Questions about Cool-n-Save, please contact us toll-free by clicking the Call Us button on the right margin.

You might also want to check out energy saving tips for some free or cheap energy and money saving solutions by clicking here!

Chilled-water and Cooling-tower AC Units

Click Here to Request Information on High Efficiency HVAC Systems and Retrofits

In a chilled-water system, the entire air conditioner lives on the roof or behind the building. It cools water to between 40 and 45 F (4.4 and 7.2 C). This chilled water is then piped throughout the building and connected to air handlers as needed. There is no practical limit to the length of a chilled-water pipe if it is well-insulated.

You can see in this diagram that the air conditioner (on the left) is completely standard. The heat exchanger lets the cold Freon chill the water that runs throughout the building.

Cooling tower

Cooling Towers
In all of the systems described earlier, air is used to dissipate the heat from the outside coil. In large systems, the efficiency can be improved significantly by using a cooling tower. The cooling tower creates a stream of lower-temperature water. This water runs through a heat exchanger and cools the hot coils of the air conditioner unit. It costs more to buy the system initially, but the energy savings can be significant over time (especially in areas with low humidity), so the system pays for itself fairly quickly.

Cooling towers come in all shapes and sizes. They all work on the same principle:

1. A cooling tower blows air through a stream of water so that some of the water evaporates.
2. Generally, the water trickles through a thick sheet of open plastic mesh.
3. Air blows through the mesh at right angles to the water flow.
4. The evaporation cools the stream of water.
5. Because some of the water is lost to evaporation, the cooling tower constantly adds water to the system to make up the difference.

Cooling towers

The amount of cooling that you get from a cooling tower depends on the relative humidity of the air and the barometric pressure.

For example, assuming a 95 F (35 C) day, barometric pressure of 29.92 inches (sea-level normal pressure) and 80-percent humidity, the temperature of the water in the cooling tower will drop about 6 degrees to 89 F (3.36 degrees to 31.7 C).

If the humidity is 50 percent, then the water temperature will drop perhaps 15 degrees to 80 F (8.4 degrees to 26.7 C).

If the humidity is 20 percent, then the water temperature will drop about 28 degrees to 67 F (15.7 degrees to 19.4 C). Even small temperature drops can have a significant effect on energy consumption.

To understand how the relative humidity and atmospheric pressure control the temperature drop in a cooling tower on any given day, check out USA Today: How a sling psychrometer works.

Whenever you walk behind a building and find a unit that has large quantities of water running through a plastic mesh, you will know you have found a cooling tower.

In many office complexes and college campuses, cooling towers and air conditioning equipment are centralized, and chilled water is routed to all of the buildings through miles of underground pipes

Bryant, Charles W., and Marshall Brain. “How Air Conditioners Work.” 01 April 2000. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://home.howstuffworks.com/ac.htm> 21 May 2008.