Posts Tagged ‘green building’
Reasons to let an engineer select your geothermal pump
I have seen well pumps get selected for geothermal for some pretty strange reasons. On one occasion, the well driller reportedly insisted that he had ample commercial well experience to select the pump. The commercial experience he was referring to turned out to be agriculture. The geothermal heating/cooling system did not work right. Sometimes well pumps get selected because the same exact pump got used successfully on another project. It would be a coincidence if the same pump conditions existed on two different projects. Since flow measurement is not always provided for on systems that aren't engineered, it is difficult to say if "working right" means doing the job without wasting energy. Once an owner asked me to use a pump he found on the internet and liked. The pump wasn't capable of sucking water high enough out of the ground to work in the Florida aquifer application. The owner reported that the well flowed artesian so it didn't matter. Conferring with the well driller confirmed that the artesian effect of the well was only seasonal. This meant the pump would only be able to draw water out of the well during rainy season. Well pumps are the heart of the system. Oversizing ...
Edible Landscaping
Green buildings get covered and talked about in a lot of ways. Today, I thought I'd blog about edible landscaping as a green venture. I have been enjoying my adventure into edible landscaping this past year. I started out by visiting the ECHO Nursery in Fort Myers. This place is worth visiting. It displays how gardens could be--attractive landscape that you eat. ECHO Nursery takes profits from the sale of carefully it's researched edible plants for our climate and then sponsors edible plant nurseries in third world countries (www.echonet.org). If you didn't know the ECHO garden was all edible, you would think you were visiting some attractive garden space. So planning a garden as if it were landscape is maybe a newer concept but a workable concept. There are a lot of edible plants that look just as good in a landscape as more conventional plants. I like my banana trees as much as any palm trees I have had before, for example. The loofah vine flowers for months at a time and looks like hibiscus, as another example. The concept of eating out of the landscape/garden is green in ...
Florida ground geothermal
I get asked quite a bit about saving money on wells by simply using the ground (or shallow ponds) as a geothermal source in Florida. The fact that this practice is successful in other parts of the USA can weigh heavily on building owner's minds. The math of the situation in Florida is that the sun beats down heavily on the ground at our latitude. As sun bather's know, the angle of the sun on one's body has a lot to do with how much solar heat one takes in. This hurts the geothermal situation in two ways. First the ground (or surface water) absorbs more heat at the very time of year we want to get rid of heat. Second, amount of heat buildings in Florida need to get rid of increases too. I actually tried out the saying that one could fry an egg on the sidewalk at the peak of summer sun. It did indeed cook and make a mess. A 35 foot deep lake is reported to contain a bottom layer of stratefied colder water, but anything less is going to be dominated by the sun in Florida. Unlike northern climates, our winters are not that cold so heat buildup in ...
More on Florida’s Aquifers and Sustainability
These recent blogs are a forum on whether or not increased geo-thermal designs and installations by Florida's contractors and HVAC engineers will cause aquifers to become contaminated with heat and metals. The heat coming from Florida's considerable air conditioning loads and the metals coming from contact between aquifer water and pipes, heat exchangers, and pumps. Today's point has to do with the thermal boundaries of Florida's aquifers. At least two factors naturally contribute to temperatures in the aquifers. One is the heat from the core of the earth itself. The closer one gets to the center of the earth the more heat one sees from the earth's core. Despite this, the Florida aquifer averages about 74F, which according to the Geothermal map of North America (link attached). So the end result of all the heat that goes into and out of Florida's aquifers is that the aquifer is considerable cooler than any other subteranean area in our latitude. Why? Florida's aquifers have this second factor in their thermal boundaries. Florida's annual downpour of rain. Parts of Florida receive over 60 inches of rain per year. This adds up to a vast amount of cool ...
Benefits of Geothermal Heatpumps
Lower energy bills. Longer equipment life. No condensing units or cooling towers exposed to outside conditions. No noisy outdoor fans (or cooling towers). Tax incentives and rebates (Section 179, Business Energy Tax Credit, Energy Star). The ability to put waste heat directly to use. Bragging rights for a Green building. The more hours a week a building spends heating and cooling at the same time, the faster geothermal systems pay for themselves. Since there are many types of geothermal heating and cooling available, and because each type has specific local conditions that it works best in; consult a local engineer as your first step in going geo. Guy Van Meulebrouck PEconsulting engineerguy@guyvanmconsulting.com10947 US 98 NorthLakeland, Florida 33809-1087 Want permission to reprint this article? Please email with your: name, title, company, the publication you are reprinting, the parts of the article you are reprinting, and your contact info.
My Green Office
It occurred to me recently that the office which I have now is the greenest office that I have ever had. This means my ambitions of having a green office have become a reality. My home office now features: 1. double pane windows and insulation conforming to Florida Energy Codes's more rigorous new standard. 2. Gas instantaneous water heater. 3. Heat pump. 4. 60% of my printer paper is 100% recycled. 5. Solar powered attic ventilation. 6. 2+ acre nature preserve on the premises. 7. By focusing my efforts from a home office, commuting by car is eliminated. My carbon footprint is greatly reduced. 8. Dual flush water closet (saves about 5,000 gallons per year). 9. Two rain barrels for watering garden and lawn. 10. Air conditioning system has now been tested and balanced for correct airflow-correcting several comfort problems in the process. 11. I am able to rely on daylighting for most of the day. 12. semi pourous driveway made of recycled materials. I don't have any exact costs but suspect to certify my office with Green Globe would be around $3,500 and to certify through LEEDS maybe $9,000? Does anyone have some better cost data?
geothermal conversions
[caption id="attachment_65" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="simple explanation of geothermal"][/caption]
Charlotte County Energy Options Conference
November 12 and 13, 2010- Charlotte County hosted a Green Futures Expo and Conference on Energy Options. It was well attended and featured various interesting topics and displays. The headline speaker was Dr. Jennifer Languell of Trifecta Construction Solutions. She spoke about cutting edge projects she helped try out (on national television) regarding environmental preservation such as covering ice in Greenland to keep it from melting etc. One company showed a solar powered geothermal pump they are bringing into production which looked pretty interesting. I was fortunate to be able to participate as a speaker on a panel regarding various aspects of geothermal. Copies of the power point presentations are available, upon request. Charlotte County has undergone very impressive re-building after hurricane Charley and has managed to rebuild with a greatly improved master plan. It was a pleasant surprise to see. The last time I had visited Punta Gorda it was two years after the hurricane and the amount of devastation still remaining was saddening.
geo-thermal vocabulary
Aquifer--an underground body of water. Closed System--geothermal system which has a closed loop of water flowing around the building that has never been in the aquifer or lake. Cooling Tower--large outdoor machine that cools water by making mist. Geothermal--also known as geothermal. A system of using the earth's temperature to benefit heating/cooling of buildings ( or electrical power generation). Heat Pump--air conditioning unit that heats and cools in about the same way using DX. DX--conventional refrigeration system used for cooling buildings. Heat Exchanger--engineered product designed to transfer temperature from one fluid to another (air is a type of fluid). Open System--a geothermal system in which water from the earth flows through the heat pump system. This is often isolated using a heat exchanger, but still considered an open system.Sustainable--capable of existing over long periods of time without complications. Variable Frequency Drive (VFD)--a device that makes motors turn lots of different speeds instead of just one. Also known as a variable speed drive (VSD). Guy Van Meulebrouck PEconsulting engineerguy@guyvanmconsulting.com10947 US 98 NorthLakeland, Florida 33809-1087 Want permission to reprint this article? Please email with your: name, title, company, the publication you are reprinting, the parts of the article you are reprinting, and your contact info.
Dual Flush Toilets-revisited
About a year ago now, I installed a dual flush conversion to our toilet at home. The local hardware store (Lowe's) was selling them for $17 so a scooped it up and installed it right away. It was easy to install and works well. I was glad to see that there was no longer any flapper valve involved or chains to hang up in the water flush action. I want to thank all the people who replied to the original blog about the dual flush toilet. I was surprised how many people like the blog. I did have one response begging me to never blog about toilets again. I am sorry to disappoint that person, but I am updating the original blog since it has been in use reliably for one year now and so many people did like the blog. I did not inform the wife I was doing this to see first hand the reaction of people in general to dual flush toilets. Even though she is not a green type of individual, she figured it out right away and didn't mind it too much at first. She did mention that the lower button was a little hard to push ...
