EES Blog

Utilizing air-side economizers during the cooler seasons can significantly reduce chilled water costs by leveraging outside air for cooling, offering substantial energy savings for businesses in temperate climates.

As we slip into fall, our thoughts turn to pumpkin spice.  Our air-side economizers – a duct and damper arrangement with a control system that enables the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system – however, think about saving chilled water costs.  If we can lower load for the chiller, we can save money due to less energy being used. If the outside air is cool and dry enough, we can open an economizer and let nature do the job instead of using the chilled water coil.  It also usually has the benefit of changing the air more quickly than during the winter or summer seasons.  

Less chilled water pumping also lowers the energy needed to move the water around. We control the differential pressure of the chilled water by slowing down the chilled water pump via a variable frequency drive (VFD), and less load raises the differential pressure.  The tower also must do less work because there is less heat rejected out to it, so the fans run slower.  This saves tower make-up water as well: less evaporation, less water needed.

Different jobs require different types of disciplines.  Not just in the academic sense, but in the practical sense.   Ask any good musician how they got that way and they will tell you practice, patience and tenacity will get you where you want to be.  Similar traits that transfer over to the controls engineering world.  There is a reason that the back of EES' business card reads “experience, something you get right after you need it”.

On September 11, 2001, EES lost a good client. We had the control system on the central chilled water plant at the World Trade Center. EES was scheduled for service at the site that day, but was postponed due to a hang-up on the purchase order, fortunately our visit was re-scheduled, to never. We knew many of the operators, some of whom stayed at their posts when the building went down.

How Optimizing Variable Refrigerant Flow Cooling Systems can Save Building Managers on Energy Usage

EES is very active with several Variable Refrigerant Flow, VRF, cooling systems’ manufacturers. In this article the condenser-water optimization on Samsung equipment will be discussed.

Vice President of Production Peter Moskal summarizes his journey along with the rest of the EES team at the 2023 Control System Integrators Association Executive Conference in New Orleans, LA.

As in years past, the employees of EES, along with their families and friends, descended upon the home of Dan & Christina Luna for an afternoon of food, fun, sunshine, and swimming. There were several families’ young children, all of whom ended up riding on the “inflate-a-bull”.

Continuing where we left off with optimizing chilled water flow, this article is taking a look at cooling tower control for the same large shopping mall in the DC area. When EES showed up for the first time on site at the chiller/tower plant, the tower control was terrible. The control was “tuned” by the client’s local HVAC tech, and it went from off, to 90%, to off, every few minutes.

The latest on Vice President of Production Pete Moskal’s travels to the Turtle Rethink Expo

As part of an overall optimization and takeback of a commercial mall in Virginia, EES engineers, step by step, enhanced systems to make a chilled-water plant more efficient. This article is about optimizing the chilled water pumping and pressure loops. In future articles, we’ll dig into condenser water loops and the overall plant optimization.

The Engineered Energy Solutions executive and marketing teams will attend the 2023 CSIA Executive Conference May 15-19, 2023 in New Orleans, Louisiana.  In addition to the educational component of the conference, EES looks to make new connections and continue its successful partnerships with other control system integrators.