ET25SWE0042 - ASHRAE Guideline 36 Using ASO

The American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (“ASHRAE”) Guideline 36 High-Performance Sequences of Operation for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (“HVAC”) Systems is considered the best-in-class control sequence in the industry. Several California Energy Commission (“CEC”) [EF1] sponsored field demonstrations in California have shown significant energy and cost savings in new commercial building design and construction, or in existing building control retrofits or upgrades. In many of these existing building control retrofits or upgrade projects, the existing building control hardware needs to be replaced with the latest version to be able to program the more complex ASHRAE Guideline 36 control sequences. This requirement significantly increases the costs of these projects. As roughly as 80% of the existing building control retrofits or upgrade project costs are for building control hardware replacement. Furthermore, a successful ASHRAE Guideline 36 implementation may need many parties involved and working together such as engineers, testing and balancing contractors, controls contractors, commissioning agents, and facility management. According to the CEC-sponsored field study, the average retrofit cost for hardware and software retrofit is around $6.40 per square foot.

With the recent advancement of Energy Management and Information Systems (“EMIS”), and as one of the EMIS applications, now there are several Automated System Optimization (“ASO”) solution providers who claim ASHRAE Guideline 36, for the most part, can be implemented at the building control system supervisory level using their ASO software. This new approach does not need existing control hardware to be replaced or upgraded, or existing control programs within the building control system field controllers to be modified. These ASO software, with their own hardware, usually gateway devices, or small computers installed onsite, would communicate to the local building control system through a standard communication protocol such as building automation and control network (“BACnet”). The ASO software can read the building control system status and operations data in real-time and automatically adjust HVAC equipment (such as “Air Handling Unit” or Variable Air Volume (“VAV”) terminal unit) supervisory-level control setpoints based on ASHRAE Guideline 36 control sequences. This could be a new way to cost-effectively implement ASHRAE Guideline 36 in existing building control retrofits or upgrades.

In this Project, Contractor will conduct field demonstrations of implementing ASHRAE Guideline 36 using the ASO approach and disseminate the results to the California Technical Forum (“CalTF”). The Project Team will discuss custom and hybrid measure opportunities with them.