The project comprises of a nine-week study to monitor the energy savings accrued by applying Enhanced Fan Delay – a retrofit device, to residential air conditioners to improve cooling performance in hot-dry climates.
The nine months monitoring period for each participating home in San Joaquin Valley region will begin in May 2010. The region’s summertime temperatures – reaching 115° F – lead to heavy air conditioning use among residents.
Proctor Engineering, a company engaged in the design and evaluation of energy efficiency programs for electric and gas utility companies, has been commissioned to develop the devices.
The Onset data loggers are compact, battery-powered devices, which will be installed on the air conditioning units to measure supply and return air temperatures, fan and compressor runtime patterns, and compressor amperage.
The recorded data will be transferred into a PC using accompanying Hoboware graphing and analysis software, and then exported into a spreadsheet program for detailed analysis. The results of the analysis are expected to be published in a report in early 2011.
Adrian Hairrell, engineer of Proctor Engineering, said: ”After a system’s compressor shuts down in hot-dry environments such as the Western US, water that has condensed on the evaporator coil can be re-evaporated into the conditioned space to boost the sensible efficiency of the unit.
”The purpose of this study is to compare the energy use of a standard system to that of the same system with the Enhanced Fan Delay control added. Our goal for the project is to realize at least 7% energy use savings in each California climate zone we monitor.”
