The Heating Season Begins…

As autumn progresses, daily temperatures begin to drop.  And so the heating season begins.  It’s that time of year when particular attention should be paid to making sure that your furnace is in good operating condition.  This means that the blower motor and burners should be thoroughly cleaned, old filters should be replaced, and the cyclic operation tested to make sure that everything works properly.  The cyclic operation is tested simply by turning up your thermostat to a temperature above the ambient where the burners should ignite and the blower motor should begin circulating air.  When the thermostat is turned down to a temperature below the ambient, the burners should turn off and the blower motor should also stop after a few minutes.  If you furnace is in a closet, make sure that anything stored in the closet that is combustible is removed and stored elsewhere or discarded.  If you will be using a gas logs unit, be sure that the burner and logs are free from dust and lint before using.  In addition, be sure that the unit is properly ventilated, your chimney damper is open or you have a window open to draw in air with a non-vented appliance.  Gas ranges are NOT intended to be used as heating appliances – please do not light all burners and keep it going indefinitely.  Carbon Monoxide can fill an enclosed room and become deadly.  Electric furnaces do not have this problem because they are not gas burning appliances.  However, heat can eventually cause wiring insulation to become brittle and short circuits can occur, leading to fires in homes and businesses.  When the heating demand is increased on boiler applications, pumps should be checked to make that water flow is not restricted and that all safety devices are operational.  Similarly, in geothermal applications water flow is critical in heat transfer between the heat source and the heat sink.  It is imperative that all piping, pumps and controls be inspected to assure proper operation and the prevention of loss due to fire.  Lastly, if you don’t know how to service your heating equipment, call a qualified service company!

Why Does the Inside of Cars Get so Hot?

We’ve all heard the warnings: don’t leave your children or pets in your car (or truck) during this time of year.  The temperatures inside the passenger compartment can reach over 100 degrees easily and quickly causing heat stroke and death.  This sounds like common sense but, every year, during the summer, reports of a death of a child or animal left in a hot car, are not uncommon.  The reason that passenger compartments get so hot is because of the way heat is transferred into and out of the compartment.  First, in order for heat to flow, there has to be a temperature difference.  As long as the inside is cooler than the outside ambient temperature, heat will flow from outside to inside.  More specifically, heat transfer will occur by convection from the ambient air to the outer surfaces of the passenger compartment, including glass.  Heat will then be transferred by conduction through the roof, insulation and headliner.  Heat transfer by conduction will also occur through windows.  There is also a radiation component that serves to heat the interior.  The sun’s rays will heat the solid parts of the interior such as dashboards and steering wheels.  The heat absorbed by these objects is then radiated to the air inside the passenger compartment.  The real clincher to this process is that the heat entering the vehicle enters at a rate faster than it is dissipated.  As a result, the temperature inside the passenger compartment can only increase.  It is not until the rate of heat transfer entering the vehicle is reduced below the rate of heat transfer out of the vehicle that the temperature in the passenger compartment is reduced.  This point usually starts to occur at dusk. 

Remember, we still have approximately one and a half months of summer left.  Please be mindful of your young passengers and pets and don’t leave them locked in a death trap!

The photos below illustrate how hot a passenger compartment can get. The photographs were taken inside a Chevrolet extended cab pick up truck.

Temperature in cab after 7 minutes with windshield shaded

Temperature after 30 minutes, windshield uncovered

Temperature after 1 hour

Temperature after 2 hours

Runaround Coil Heat Recovery

With all the talk about green house gases and oil dependency, energy efficiency and specifically, energy savings, is a top consideration these days.  One of the things that you don’t hear about too often is something called a “runaround” coil.  The system isn’t really limited to a coil but, instead describes a very simple  system for absorbing heat from one air stream and rejecting it to another.  Consider a large office building or hospital application where 100% outside air is conditioned, distributed to the individual spaces, and then completely exhausted.  A runaround system is nothing more than two heat transfer coils, one positioned in the inlet air stream ahead of the conditioning coils, and the other in the exhaust air stream.  The two coils are connected by piping in which water or a glycol solution is circulated by a centrifugal pump, hence the name “runaround”.  During the summer when outdoor air temperatures can reach into the 90s and 100s, the fluid in the runaround system absorbs heat from the outside air and in the process, cools it to a certain temperature.  The heat carried by the fluid is then circulated to the coil in the exhaust air stream where it is rejected to the air.  Heat rejection occurs because the exhaust air is at a temperature lower than that of  the fluid stream.  Significant energy savings occur when the cooling requirements of the building can be reduced.  For example, a building without a runaround system has a 100 ton load.  In order to meet the load, the cooling equipment has to cool outside air from 95 to 55 degrees.  Precooling of the outside air by 5 degrees (90 degrees) reduces the load on the cooling equipment to approximately 87 tons.  Dropping the cooling requirement by 13 tons can result in significant electrical energy cost savings.  Now, what happens if evaporative cooling is employed in the exhaust air stream? If an evaporative cooler is added upstream of the runaround coil, then the air stream can be cooled further resulting in an increased heat transfer rate from the fluid to the air stream, further reducing the cooling capacity requirements of the cooling equipment.   The use of a runaround coil is not a novel idea but one whose time is coming.