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Choosing Data Loggers For Green Building Projects
The green building industry is growing quickly, and successful projects benefit
from assessment and evaluation at all stages. From hospitals and industrial
complexes to single-family homes, measurements of conditions such as temperature,
solar
radiation, and energy consumption are essential to carrying out and testing
designs.
Battery-powered data loggers are powerful tools that monitor a wide
range of
indoor and outdoor parameters. The data they collect can help users select
sites, verify design, allow for adjustments, and generate required documentation
for
projects in line for LEED® Certification, the industry standard.
Today’s data loggers are small, low-cost, rugged devices that can take
unattended indoor and outdoor measurements at user-specified intervals 24 hours
a day, 7 days a week. Indoor units are already in common use by performance
contractors and engineers responsible for monitoring energy efficiency and
usage, air quality,
and heating ventilation/air conditioning/refrigeration (HVAC/R). Weather stations
are used outdoors worldwide by research scientists and farmers for collecting
environmental data such as rainfall, wind speed, and solar radiation.
Whether you are an experienced data logger user or are just getting started,
this guide will help you to understand how data loggers fit into the green
building industry, and will give advice about several areas to consider when
selecting
a logger best suited for your particular needs.
The goals of green building are to increase building efficiency with regard
to energy, materials, and water use; to take advantage of natural resources
such
as solar radiation and wind; and to lessen the environmental impact of building
siting, construction, and operation. In practice, some designs address all
these factors, while other buildings incorporate just a few.
Data loggers can provide valuable information for nearly every aspect and
scale of green design. For example, a facilities manager can monitor temperature
in a fifteen-story office building over the summer to check whether the fans
in
the building’s cooling tower need adjustment.
A homeowner considering adding passive solar hot water panels to his roof
can deploy a weather station first to determine where solar radiation is most
intense,
and how many sunny days there are per year. Engineers can monitor energy use
in a retrofitted elementary school to make sure that new lighting and appliances
are indeed cutting electricity costs.
In an effort to create a national industry standard, the U.S. Green Building
Council (www.usgbc.org) created the Leadership in Energy and Environmental
Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System®. This system serves as a guide for measuring
and documenting successful green building practices at all phases of a building’s
lifecycle. Guidelines cover site selection, new construction, renovation, and
occupancy/facilities management, and can apply from homes to entire neighborhoods.
Data logging devices are valuable during the LEED Certification process because
documentation is required by the USGBC every step of the way.
Whether you are involved in the construction of a LEED Certified campus center
or are retrofitting your home with PV panels, data loggers can provide you
with valuable data, from design concept to operation.
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