Embodied energy of high performance glass

During our ongoing training program on Energy Simulation of Buildings for LEED and ECBC at IIIT Hyderabad these days (Dec. 16-19, 2010), again some participants raised the point of high embodied energy in high performance glazing solutions.

I feel that due to lack of data regarding embodied energy, there is much hype getting generated against high performance glazing. People are releasing statements saying that such glass is not able to pay the energy invested in making itself through energy savings.

Some preliminary analysis has shown that the share of embodied energy in the entire life cycle energy of a building is less than 3% since over the life of about 40 years, operational energy is much more than embodied energy that is invested one time only.

We are doing detailed analysis of this topic to help the building sector understanding the correlation between the two, this would help in establishing the usefulness of high performance glazing.

In fact with this intent only we visited few glass manufacturing units in India, but manufacturers are little hesitant in releasing the data. We are trying to convince them that such analysis will help them and would not be going against then in any way. This would remove the mental blockage present in the building sector against extensive use of good glass.

Let us see how and when can we convince them and get the data.

Sign of climate change

During past recent days, western India has seen much rainfall, higher than ever before in winter season. I guess, this is due to climate change that is gradually taking place worldwide. Last winter in Europe was quite harsh with lot of snow fall, breaking records of several years. Due to this unexpected rain, temperature has gone down sharply, and heating energy demand has started little earlier as compared to normal years when it starts in December first or second week.

Enjoy the winters fruits, vegetables, bar-be-que and sitting in sun!

jyotirmay

Lighting with bulbs on Diwali

This Diwali again, lot of incandescent bulbs were seen in use for decorative lighting. Despite several appeals for not using the bulbs for decoration, most of the market associations and shopkeepers did not respond and continued using the same inefficient bulbs.

I think when we have surplus money, we become unconcerned about energy efficiency and other similar issues related to sustainability.

Since awareness campaigns and voluntary action is not working well in this field, government should ban use of incandescent lamps, especially for decorative lighting. It has to be done similar to the way polythene bags have been banned in Rajasthan.

Same action is required to curb the firing of crackers that pollute our environment like anything.

Jyotirmay

In India, Diwali, the festival of lights is coming close. On the name of celebration, many government buildings are illuminated using incandescent bulbs which is a huge wastage of energy.
Government should make a rule about maximum permissible energy per sqm of facade area for festival lighting.

DIREC 10 in New Delhi

There is a big renewable energy event going on in New Delhi these days: DIREC 2010, from Oct 26-29, 2010. This is one of the biggest exhibitions in this field. Since lot of people are now looking for renewable energy based applications such as lights, fans, water heaters, small scale wind mills, bio-mass gasifiers or briquetting machines; this exhibition can be a good place to find products of interest.

I am also sending my students to see what all is available in market and for them all these are potential employers too!

Clean up filter of your air conditioners

Few days back I opened cover of an Air-conditioner in the institute and saw the filter. It is very easy, anybody can open a removable cover in the front of window air conditioners and in split air conditioners, it is usually hinged that can be pulled up. The filer was so dirty that when I kept it facing the sun, I could not see even a single ray of sunlight. Just imagine, how can the return air pass through it in such condition. The person was complaining that his AC has stopped cooling the room. Now I think reason is quite clear.

Needless to day that when he cleaned up the filter and started the AC, it cooled the room pretty well. I guess, dirty filters alone result into something about 10-15% energy wastage in ACs.

Then we checked filters of several other ACs and found the most of the ACs have dirty filters.

This not only deteriorates performance of AC, but also provides cool place for growth of infection and also acts as accumulator for respirable class dirt particles.

We should clean up the filters once every month to avoid such situation.

Passiv cooling

Yesterday I was at one workshop on Green buildings and once again felt that the field of passive cooling is driven by sentiments rather than science. Especially passive techniques such as earth air tunnels, where underground pipes are used for cooling/heating ambient air before feeding into the building, significance of key design issues such as diameter, spacing between pipes, flow velocity are less known. Whereas, if not chosen properly they can simply not permit the tunnel to work inefficiently and make it a monument rather than a functional passive cooling system.

I am worried about this issue is simply because such examples create wrong notion about the concept not being useful/successful whereas there is nothing wrong about the concept and its utility.

First Blog

Hello!

I am in GBC 2010 Chennai and am starting my new blog today. Welcome.

JM