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