DIY HVAC 315
An anonymous reader writes "I found this very interesting project called DIY Zoning. It allows one to add air flow balancing, temperature control, zoning, home automation, and more to an existing or new HVAC system. After getting a $200 electric bill, this sounds like a good solution for those who are getting screwed with outrageously high electric bills due to their HVAC unit especially since organizations like TVA have raised the electric rates."
(Godfather Voice) Don't forget about the family! (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget about Haywire [sourceforge.net], Jukebox [sourceforge.net], and ServoMaster [sourceforge.net], all of which are hosted at SourceForge and directly tie-in to the temperature zoning system featured in this Slashdot posting.
[Oh, and FWIW, Professor Tkachenko's son is a cutie (an old college friend of mine knew him)!]
HVAC Heating, Ventilation, & Air Conditioning (Score:5, Informative)
That project doesn't conform to the industry specs (Score:4, Informative)
Don't complain about TVA (Score:5, Informative)
Read this:
http://www.nemw.org/tvareport.htm
Zoning rocks (Score:5, Informative)
Take this house for example, 2000 sq ft 2 story farmhouse, 1950's anderson windows, still nice but not real tight, no in wall insulation, attic is aesbestos (but now sealed)
The house is set up into 3 zones, on an old , circa 1950 American Standard electro-mechanical zone system, it is hot water heat, about half baseboard, the other half cast radiators, the heat throught the hose is awesome, never too cold anywhere. Now, the fun part, we dont have gas, and electric was way too ineffecient to heat this house soooo, my grandfather a pipefitter as well installed the system back in the 50's
The wind up of all this , my heating bill for the entire year ? Under $600 Thats 350 gallons of oil, I only took 310 or so after 13 months last time I topped off. And I live near Cleveland Ohio (Akron), not exactly warm winters here ya know
Looking in all the wrong places (Score:5, Informative)
The author obviously didn't look in the right places. Here are a few links to get started:
SmartHome [smarthome.com]
HomeTech Solutions [hometech.com]
Bass Burglar Alarms [bassburglaralarms.com]
I've done business with all three, and have retrofitted my home with a two-zone system powered by an RCS zone controller and electronic dampers. All three have been extremely helpful in providing technical advice.
One thing to remember: The HVAC business (as well as the burglar alarm business) are very protective of their turf. You stand little chance of finding an HVAC contractor willing to work with you on designing a custom HVAC system.
Re:wow that freaked me out for a second (Score:3, Informative)
Here are some more ideas (with graphs) (Score:5, Informative)
I found the site while searching for information on heat pump water heaters. One example graph they give shows the heat pump water heater using less than half the energy as resistive heating.
If installed properly, a heat pump water heater will also help air-condition your house. A good place to put ducts is in the kitchen, where the waste heat from cooking can be removed and used to heat water. Ideally, the returned cooled air can be directed at your refrigerator's condenser coils for increased efficiency.
Before you do *any* of this stuff. (Score:5, Informative)
No dampers here (Score:4, Informative)
Not as good as using dampers, but much simpler. I put a copy of the webpage for this system on my website:
System_Hvac [certsoft.com]
Re:Easier way to lower the electricity bill (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What about water conservation?? (Score:5, Informative)
- Install stormwater tanks. Hook them up to your roof's stormwater system, with the excess (that the tanks can't store) going into the stormwater drains, as the whole lot used to do. Use this water to flush toilets, water gardens, and possibly wash clothes and shower in (depending on the quality of the rainwater you get).
- Redirect water from your shower to gardens, toilets, etc. You may need to treat it to get rid of soap, shampoo, etc. residues.
- Fix those leaking taps.
- Take shorter showers.
- Install a water-saving shower head.
- Stop hosing down the damn concrete driveway. Use a broom, or a blower if you're that damn lazy.
Here in Australia, stormwater tanks used to be illegal! That's changed, though, as the Powers That Be came to the realisation that our water resources are limited, they won't be expanding, and yet they have to support a growing population. The scary thing is, since my father installed stormwater tanks for our showers, toilets, and laundry, our water bills dropped by a third (or more).As an aside, there's one place in Melbourne (Aus) that has no water bill. None. Zero. Zip. They were actually investigated pretty thoroughly when this happened, because authorities assumed they were stealing water from their neighbours. Not so, though; they were just very efficient with their water use and recycling, and were able to fill their needs from stormwater.
RHVAC (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No HVAC here, sorry. (Score:3, Informative)
In a somewhat related note, a little trick for those of you with swamp coolers. When you start them up for the first time in the spring, after you flush the system and scrape out the scale and dust, fill it with water and add half a cup of fabric softener to the reservoir. Makes the whole house smell clean. This may not sound like much to people who don't know swamp coolers, but for those that do- you know how bad they can stink after a winter of disuse!
Re:wow that freaked me out for a second (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Before you do *any* of this stuff. (Score:4, Informative)
Now, if you are me, you live in a apartment located partway underground and you love mother earth. Thanks to being mostly underground my heating/cooling bills are 1/3 of my upstairs friends. Viva La Basments!
Re:Two concerns: Resale and housing code (Score:3, Informative)
Now as to the usability, it appears there is a current problem there with respect to the common user. However, once invested in the hardware and if you have a decent head for development, the system seems that it has a great potential for being amazingly simple (I have not looked at the code myself) to tack on a custom designed GUI with your touchscreen in mind. Of course, embedding a significant flat panel in the wall is not so reversible as the cheap approach
Re:Easier way to lower the electricity bill (Score:5, Informative)
You will pay more for parts than for the electricity [energy.gov] ($1.25 for the entire lifetime of the device, or, about 30 cents yearly).
bad programing (Score:3, Informative)
That is a cheap solution that will for for some. However your temperature settings are wrong.
When you are at home in summer, set the thermostat to 85, or 2 degrees below the outdoor temperature. You do not need it any colder, you body can handle high temperatures just fine. (There are exceptions, but those folks are under doctors care often anyway) When humidity gets to you, lower the thermostat just enough to get some of it out of the air.
In winter your pipes need heat more than you do. Invest in a few sweaters. When you have guests raise the temperature to 68. When you are sick set the thermostat above 68 if it makes you more comfortable. Set it to 62 when you are sleeping, invest in some blankets if this seems cold. I keep my thermostat at 60 in winter, no matter what, and I'd go colder but the thermostat is upstairs, and I don't want to chance my pipes freezing.
Check with your utility before doing anything though. Mine offers a discounted energy rate (off-peak) if I let them control the AC. I need to leave the AC on my at home temperature all day, because when I get home they normally hit peak loads, and so are most likely to turn my unit off. (This sounds bad, but in practice you never notice it, other than lower utility bills despite having a cool house all the time). They have a similar program for heat, but I have gas heat so I don't pay attention
Re:That project doesn't conform to the industry sp (Score:3, Informative)
Finally! (Score:3, Informative)
ah, technology.
Check out this week's "This Old House" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Here's some solutions to help lower the bill: (Score:2, Informative)
Please. Do you live in Texas? I don't want to hear about doing without air conditioning. I had no AC in my car, and I had to drive a lot. Spending eight hours sweating in 80 consecutive days of over-100 degree heat is not fun.
I'm sorry, but air conditioning in this state is not a luxury one can "do without".
Gray Water Toilet - pictures and info! (Score:4, Informative)
Would there be anything wrong with using your shower water as toilet water? I honestly can't see anything wrong with that and it'd certainly cut down on somebody's water bill from month to month.
I meant to reply here rather than my post in the previous parent, I clicked on the link and brainfarted about the subject.
My toilet costs me about $200/year to flush (based on number of flushes per day counted for a typical week, and the size of the toilet's tank). So I built a system to refill it using water from my washing machine [glowingplate.com].
I did also consider using the water from the shower, but in practice, the water from the washing machine provides enough water to keep the storage barrel full.
Whether you have one or several toilets, the number of flushes per day is probably proportional to the number of people in the house. Since the laundry usage is also proportional to the number of people in the house, the water barrel is likely to remain full, but I'm sure there'd be no harm in dropping a pipe off the clean-out port at the bottom of the bathtub/shower U-trap, putting in another U-trap to serve as a vapor barrier, and draining that into the barrel. A couple of barrels should probably also be paralleled for a high-volume multiple toilet installation, but if you store too much water, it will start to grow (stinky) algae.
I tried paralleling barrels, but in practice, I didn't need to - just two people in my house. It'd be very easy to do, just a hose connecting fittings near the bottoms of each barrel, and they'll reach an equilibrium even if it's several minutes after the washing machine has finished a drain cycle.
As for what's wrong with gray water toilets, I don't know. I know it's against building codes here, but I don't know why. My system, not being a permanent installation or requiring any modification to the existing plumbing, skirts the rules about building codes.
I have yet to find a single disadvantage to my gray water system.
HVAC is too expensive! So we went for swampies. (Score:4, Informative)
Originally, we investigated the possibility of going for an HVAC reverse-cycle capable system but the running costs, along with the prohibitive installation costs were from Mars, or something. They wanted "only" AU$3000 for install of the three phase, plus it was about ten grand for the system and installation.
Installing split-system wall units was also an idea, however, cold air doesn't easily move throughout the house due to airflow being restricted so you'd realistically want units in every room. All of a sudden, Carrier's centrally airconditioned system doesn't look too bad.
In the end, we went with two evaporative coolers from a company called Brivis [brivis.com.au] (Australian). These units are self-cleaning and self-maintained, too, so we don't have to dash up on the roof every six months. Our heating system is also from the same company and was the most efficient on the market when we had it installed.
Now, the nifty thing is that our wall controllers have backlight LCD displays and use RS232 (or 422 - I can't remember but I know that it was standard) for communication, so it should be easy to, say, hook one up to a PC if I really wanted to, although these AU$200 wall controllers have been installed in factory environments with 12 coolers in them. On one controller.
And because the installers of the cooling were slack (we should be able to have both coolers AND the heater on the ONE controller) and didn't want to run cables under the house, they installed seperate controllers for each cooler. So I've got one to play with if I felt like running some cables.
So how is it? Cheap to run, but be warned that evaporative coolers are better when you start them in the morning before it gets hot - the ideas is to cool the air by moving a lot of it. Windows need to be kept open to allow the airflow to occur or else things get very humid. And on a reasonable day, I've had the coolers bring the temperature from 38C down to a comfortable 21C.
But as other people have observed, these coolers become ineffective on humid days - we had a day with 80% relative humidity where the temp came down from 40C to about 32C - still a change, but it was still hellishly humid inside.
I'd love real HVAC cooling. It's dry, quiet and I can keep all the doors and windows closed, however it costs a fortune to install and a fortune to run.
Also, most HVAC systems had zoning as a feature. Heck, my heating has zoning built-in. I don't see what all the fuss is about.
Openess in Controls Industry (Score:3, Informative)
Begining to change - a number of these industries are moving into SOAP, with such niche languages as CSML (Control System ML) and legacy-extenders such as Bacnet/XML and LON/XML creeping into the market
Check out the Continental Automated Building Association (CABA [caba.org]) a consortium of companies now working on OBIX [builtalk.com], (Open Building Information eXchange) whose mission is to expose the API's or Building Automation Systems (HVAC, Access Control, Security, even X10 is on board) under a common XML schema.
Somewhere out there is a White Box ML, for interfaces to Refrigerators, Washing Machines, Dryers, etc. This effort is an extension of the earlier UPNP [upnp.org] (Universal Plug and Play) work done earlier than SOAP was around for interfaces to consumer electronics, computing, home automation, home security, appliances, printing, photography, computer networking, and mobile products.
SOAP is also creeping onto electric meters (see Power Measurement's [pwrm.com] ION line, some of the GE product lines) although these are still priced more for the industrial solution. Eaton Electric's Cutler-Hammer is even selling a SOAP-enabled Power Panel [eatonelectrical.ca] (you know, the grey box with circuit breakers in your back room)
The IAI, the engineering standards group, is working the issue from the other end, developping top-down standards drilling down to meet OBIX coming up, most notably in Green Building XML [gbxml.org] (GBXML) which has a lovely schema. Major CADD companies such as Autodesk, Bentley, and Intergraph have committed to support GBXML in their tools when modelling is used for design.
There is going to be a lot more of this in the future, and SOAP is going to be the ticket.
Re:A nerdy approach that certainly outweighs mine (Score:1, Informative)
Other things to try:
Re:(Godfather Voice) Don't forget about the family (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What about water conservation?? (Score:2, Informative)
It's not such a good idea to use black water on your garden, especially on plants intended for human consumption and is probably illegal wherever you live.
I was talking with a neighbour about grey water and he pointed out that in general we take water quality for granted unless there is an outbreak of some horrible water-borne illness, which is the point behind the various planning laws to do with grey and black water usage.
Oh my God, that's cheap power (Score:2, Informative)
Energy efficiency is very important here and would have a great payback period, except that unless you do it entirely yourself the contractors will make you pay through the nose. The state makes various "barriers to entry" such as several layers of licensing so tradespeople's hourly rates for jobs of that kind of size are comparable to lawyers and doctors (I am not kidding).
When it gets hot here it is frequently very humid and this takes even more energy to cool. My worst computer failure was one summer when I was out, the air conditioner tripped off, and the room where I had my system got to 130 degrees. The complete failure and subsequent head crash of the disk was made serious by the failure of the backup system to make usable tapes for the past month.
Re:Buy a new fridge, and other suggestions. (Score:5, Informative)
"I worked it out once...100-200W over 24x7x365 equals a LOT of money per year!"
First - that math is for 7 years, it should be 24 x 7 x 52.179 or 24 x 365.25
200W x 24hrs/day x 365.25days/year = 1753.2kW-hours / year.
At a rate of $0.08/kW-hour = $140.
Now - that is assuming that it is using the full 200W all the time. A 200W or 300W power supply is needed because there is a lot more power used when the disks are spinning up or that CD/DVD is spinning and writing. Even a more busy CPU and graphics card will draw significantly more power. So that box is probably drawing only a fraction of that power on average which means that it isn't really close to that much.
Now if I could just find my clamp-on amp-meter to give some real power numbers on my own boxen.........
Re:A nerdy approach that certainly outweighs mine (Score:3, Informative)
I live in a climate known to have some of the greatest temperature variations on the planet. -40C in the winter, +40C (and humid) in the summer. Yes, Alaska is colder, and yes, Florida is much, much warmer (especially when it's humid out). But it doesn't drop to -40 in Florida that often. Up here (central Canada, for those curious), you can always tell when people have just moved here, and from where. Mostly we get people from warmer climes, and they're the ones wearing scarfs and mitts when we're walking around in a T-shirt (this is pretty much any temperature above freezing during the spring).
How's this relate to HVAC? Well, it's funny. We get roughly 2-3 months a year where the temperature is above "room" on average - that is, 20C/68F outside during the middle of the day. Yet, most new houses, and plenty of older ones, have central air. People who don't live here think we're crazy. There are really only a few weeks every summer where it's so hot that your house even warms up inside, and yet we spend a ton of cash on an A/C unit. Why?
Well, our electricity is CHEAP. Mostly (all?) hydro-electric. But the biggest reason is our bodies. Let me tell you, living in this climate, you *really* notice heat. When it gets close to 30C outside, it's unpleasant. Add in the 60-70% humidity, and I can hardly move outside. When it gets in the high 30s (100F and up for the yanks), it's intolerable. Our bodies simply aren't used to the heat. After a few days of this, most people just seem to laze around. It becomes difficult to concentrate at work, and sleeping is well nigh impossible. There's also the sweating factor. I just don't do it. It's never warm enough for me to perspire much here, unless I'm doing some strenuous activity. But for a couple of weeks every summer, people start to smell, and not in the roses kind of way.
I talk to people who live in places like Texas, Florida, Mexico.. and to them this is pretty much what it's like all the time (or at least most of the summer). They're used to it, and have adjusted. Of course, the thought of going for a walk at night when it's -25C outside is simply impossible to them
If you're used to sleeping in 85F, fine, but not for me. If you enjoy sweating all the time, hey, that's your perogative. But I gotta tell you, I enjoy creature comforts. You could also save a lot of money by living in a tent, sleeping on the ground, or washing in a local lake/river (assuming that's legal where you live). Sometimes money isn't the only reason to do something.
I do this for a living.... (Score:3, Informative)
IOW, be careful. I sell my expertise. If someone wants to design a system, then they are welcome to, but I'm not interested in getting involved. This isn't unscrupulous. Guess who you'll call if it doesn't work? Or something burns out? And my time is expensive. I could fiddle with something for days, but will I be payed for it?
Another issue is the high efficiency cooling equipment, or heat pumps. In humid areas, if you install as per manufacturer's specs for the most efficient, the unit will not dry the air out, and can contribute to mould and high humidity issues. So you may save a couple hundred over a year, then need to spend multiple thousands replacing windows, saturated insulation, etc. Again be careful.
Swamp coolers work well in very dry areas. In moderate to humid areas, don't even think of them. They will rot your house, and possibly make you sick.
The best way to save on cooling costs are to shut it off. To save on heating costs, have the house cooler and even cold at night.
Derek
Re:Check out this week's "This Old House" (Score:2, Informative)
Re:bad programing (Score:1, Informative)
You are the one whose temperature numbers are wrong if you think everyone lives in a location where the high temperature in the summer is 85F! I'm sorry, on days when the ambient temperature is 108F, 2 degrees below the ambient temperature is 106F, and your body really cannot handle temperatures above 100F just fine. Eventually, the evaporation of sweat is simply insufficient to keep your body temperature at 98.6F.
Also, if you read the web site that the story is about, you'll see that the reason the project was started is that the author lives in a 3-story house where the temperature can very between rooms as much as 10F. This is inefficient no matter what you set the thermostat to. The point is to cool and heat the house evenly, so that you are not cooling one room unnecessarily just to get other rooms to a comfortable temperature.