Managing a facility is a year-round endeavour, but the challenges you face in June are completely different from those in January. With costs fluctuating, energy usage changing and evolving emissions regulations adapting to new policy, maintaining an efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable facility may feel impossible at times.
But it’s not.
Here at CPA Engineered Solutions, we believe that by embracing the latest technology, we can create facilities that are not just better for the planet, but better for your finances. With efficient systems in place, you can make sure your operations go uninterrupted and avoid any costly delays.
In the summer, you could be battling against heat; either inside due to your processes or machinery and stagnant air, and high external temperatures all of which could be dangerous for both equipment and employees. It’s demands like this that makes it vital to make sure your site is equipped with the technology to maintain a comfortable environment for occupants, whilst also ensuring the warm temperatures don’t infiltrate cool areas like freezers or refrigerated rooms.
Winter brings its own set of challenges, particularly when it comes to heating your facility. Keeping spaces warm and comfortable can demand significant increase in energy costs, especially if you rely on gas – over the last few years, we’ve all seen just how expensive that can be when markets are volatile. Your facility likely already has a HVAC system installed to keep staff warm, but simple heating alone can often be inefficient and costly.
So let’s take a look at the best technology that can support your facility all year round.
Year-round temperature control
De-stratification fans
Installing fans within your facility can support both your heating and cooling efforts. It’s a basic concept that warm air rises, so when you’re heating large rooms or warehouses, the heated air will move towards the ceiling before warming the air where most of your staff will actually be. In rooms with ceilings as little as 10m high, there can be a difference of up to 20 degrees when comparing temperatures on the ground against temperatures at ceiling height. Consequently, HVAC thermostat settings within the building can be lowered, allowing for reductions in energy costs, without sacrificing occupant comfort.
In winter, this means your heating systems are operating more than necessary.
De-stratification fans work by supporting the circulation of warm air made by your heating systems around your large rooms. This means warm air doesn’t end up floating to the top of your facility, instead it mixes with the colder air keeping your staff comfortable and your heating bills much lower.
But de-stratification fans aren’t just for supporting your heating bills; the same challenges faced by heating large areas happen when cooling large areas. For facilities with de-stratification fans, setting these to spin faster creates a wind chill effect which cools your facility much quicker (and without the significant energy cost) when compared to air conditioning and having these installed across your larger rooms means that the cooling is spread out around your facility not just nearby where the air conditioning units are.
Fast Action Doors
Facilities with specific temperature requirements, such as refrigeration rooms or industrial freezers face a unique set of challenges. When exterior doors are frequently opened for access, maintaining a comfortable environment for occupants becomes even more difficult. In such cases, HVAC systems – whether for cooling or heating – often need to run continuously to maintain required conditions.
This creates a huge amount of unnecessary emissions. Many sites try and solve this problem by using PVC plastic curtains but this can cause many issues, from being unsanitary to restricting visibility.
Fast Action Doors give much better control over the environment within your facility, by opening and closing rapidly, they keep environments completely separate whether between rooms within your facility or outside and work much better at creating a seal than PVC plastic curtains.
This helps you reduce unnecessary costs and emissions in heating or cooling down certain parts of your facility, whether in winter or summer.
Enershield Air Barriers
Of course, Fast Action Doors do still need to be open as people and goods need access between rooms – and that’s where products like Enershield Air Barriers comes in.
Enershield Air Barriers use high performance fans that draw in facility air generating a smooth laminar flow that creates up to a 90% seal across open doorways. That means even when doors are opened, whether you’re using Fast Action Doors or they’re over standard doorways, temperature transference is significantly reduced.
These are ideal for facilities with industrial freezers or facilities with large doorways like hangar bay doors. In winter, facilities with these large doorways will have to deal with significant heat loss and any attempt to heat these environments will often end up with the warm air escaping through the large openings. Enershield Air Barriers can accommodate sizes up to 11.5m tall and are built to suit any width of doorway.
By pulling in facility air from above, Enershield Air Barriers also help destratify the air within your site.
That is what we recommend to help your facility maintain temperatures, reducing usage of your HVAC systems, saving you money and helping you reach emissions targets. But what about systems that have more seasonal usages? Of course, in locations that see year-round cold or warm weather, like many of our clients, some of this equipment will be useful to you regardless of the time of year.
Summer
High temperature working environments can have a big impact on staff productivity so maintaining a cool temperature during summer months is key to keeping operations moving. Running air conditioning or using personal devices like desk fans can be a costly endeavour, so what are the alternatives?
Breezair Evaporative Cooling
Evaporative cooling is one of the most efficient ways of cooling a facility. By using water and electricity, it draws in outside air which passes through a wetted matrix, cooling it down rapidly without significant energy usage. This cool air is then moved into your facility, cooling the air down.
When comparing Evaporative Cooling to traditional air conditioning, you could achieve between 80-85% savings in your energy spend, keeping your costs low and reducing the amount of energy you need to keep your facility cool.
An additional benefit of this is that you don’t just have a consistent supply of cool air, but a consistent supply of outdoor, fresh air without needing to have windows and doors open, risking contaminants entering your facility.
Evaporative Cooling is ideal for industries that operate with a high heat load due to machinery, so even without factoring in warm summer temperatures, it’s an ideal solution if you need to lower your building’s temperature.
Hybrid Roof Ventilation
In warm temperatures, having a well-ventilated environment is vital to keeping staff cool and comfortable within your facility. This is especially important for facilities that want to extract heat and fumes. Hybrid Roof Ventilation offers a more efficient alternative to expensive, noisy and high maintenance mechanical extraction systems.
By combining natural and mechanical processes, Hybrid Roof Ventilation uses a combination of wind and a motor to allow for the extraction of heat and fumes from your facility without using significant energy.
For one of our clients, we successfully reduced indoor temperatures by 25%. You can read about this in our case study here.
Winter
For many organisations, heating your facility/facilities in winter is among the most expensive operational costs. Beyond the financial implications, this can have a significant impact on your sustainability targets throughout winter. Finding a more efficient way of heating your facility is vital to not only helping reduce costs but reaching any environmental goals your site might have.
Air Source Heat Pump
Natural gas and fossil fuels are one of the leading causes of emissions across the world and one that the price of which can fluctuate greatly for reasons completely out of your control. If you are rightly looking to reduce your facility’s reliance on natural gas, Air Source Heat Pumps are a great option for you.
By using a refrigerant to absorb heat from outside air (even in the coldest temperatures) the Air Source Heat Pump then uses that heat as any heating system would, using just electricity with no need for natural gas.
This can help reduce emissions significantly, especially if you’re using renewable sources to generate your electricity.
Wherever your site is located and whatever environmental factors you might have to deal with, making an investment into new technologies can help significantly reduce costs and emissions and many technologies can support in ways beyond just reducing, increasing or maintaining temperatures.
Here at CPA, we believe in helping organisations get the most optimal equipment to help their specific situations, so if you think there’s room for improvement within your facility and you want to save significant amounts of operational costs or reduce emissions.
