Compressed Air Best Practices - November 2008 - (Page 18) | 11–12/08 Focus Industry STEEL & METALS | BY JON MAXWELL With all of the different LEED credits and associated M&V requirements and tax incentive opportunities for businesses to reduce energy consumption, we have seen an increasing demand for metering. Companies are looking for more ways to estimate cost savings and prove that their energy saving investments are working. In addition to that, we are seeing more requests to monitor the impact of sustainability initiatives. In recent years, building commissioning has become a bigger industry that requires data. Both of these trends have spurred a greater need to invest in portable data logging equipment. Air compressor monitoring is a good example where battery-powered data loggers can be useful. When air compressors are not performing properly, they can obviously be huge energy wasters. The types of control and control settings have a major impact on the energy use of an air compressor and thus there are often many energy-saving opportunities. One of the most effective means by which to characterize and quantify these opportunities is through the use of data loggers. However, through the years, we’ve seen a lot of misconceptions about how to monitor air compressors. A lot of people are not aware of the control mode that their compressor is operating under and what the monitoring intervals should be for an air compressor or process machine. Many use longer intervals (five minutes and up) to capture the energy use of the compressor over an extended time period (at least a week) and this is certainly important. However, air compressors can have a frequent rate of change in power consumption and thus the data-sampling interval should be set at a rate that you can capture change. 18 www.airbestpractices.com http://www.airbestpractices.com
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