The food and beverage industry uses a great deal of energy, costing plants in the U.S. an average of $643,000 per year, mostly for heating and cooling. These plants typically use gas-fired water heaters or boilers to produce hot water and electrically driven mechanical refrigeration systems for cooling. ...

Evaporative coolers in residential applications save energy compared with conventional vapor-compression air conditioners. The OASys cooler addresses some of the technology's problems by using both direct and indirect evaporative cooling.

This Brief describes Green Building Studio, a web-based service that enables building design teams to integrate whole-building energy analysis into the early stages of the design process.

New home construction in California adds significantly to peak loads, in part because it's common practice to install conventional air conditioning in new homes, even in mild climates. This Tech Brief describes how the NightBreeze system, which integrates heating, ventilation, cooling, and air conditioning, ...

The practices of commissioning new buildings and retrocommissioning existing facilities offer the potential to significantly reduce energy use and improve the building environment. However, commissioning is not widely practiced because building owners have had no sources that explain the benefits ...

Though tools and methods are available for the design of energy-efficient HVAC systems, they are not often used when it comes to production homes. That’s partly because builders of production homes are unaware that these tools exist. In addition, the existing design methodologies are often hard ...

Lights in the bathrooms of hotels, senior living centers, and nursing homes are frequently left on for extended periods—either due to forgetfulness or deliberately so that they can serve as night-lights. The night-light function is especially critical in senior housing, where tripping and falling ...

Most office equipment and consumer electronic devices use external power supplies to convert high-voltage alternating current into the low-voltage direct current that they need to operate. The majority of these power supplies are far less efficient than they could be—their efficiency is on the ...

Wall-pack luminaires with high-pressure sodium (HPS) lamps are commonly used to provide outdoor illumination for all types of buildings and many parking lots, yet they are among the least-efficient fixtures made and provide poor glare control. The standard design approach makes a trade-off between ...

A building’s performance is sensitive to the amount of outside air that is brought inside—too little results in poor indoor air quality, and too much results in wasted energy used to condition the excess air. However, it is difficult and costly to measure ventilation airflows, especially at outdoor-air ...