Building America Team: University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Partner: Air Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute (AHRI)
Testing and monitoring newly-installed HVAC systems in multiple climate zones will provide real-world data and quantified potential energy savings to guide installation practices and future research to prevent, mitigate, or easily identify and address installation faults.
Some estimates indicate that more than 65% of residential HVAC systems have been improperly installed and are performing suboptimally. Suboptimal performance is a result of problems such as insufficient indoor coil airflow rate, incorrect refrigerant charge, or an inefficient air distribution system. This project will provide reliable field data on the prevalence and severity of each of the major fault types.
Between 50 and 80 newly installed HVAC systems will be tested in each of the following climate zones: cold, marine, and mixed-humid. Long-term monitors will be installed on a subset of the systems to evaluate change in performance over the course of the research and complement site visit measurements. The data gathered will be used to develop accurate fault prevalence distributions for each fault type of interest and assess energy impact. This real-world data and quantified potential energy savings will guide installation practices and future research and development to prevent, mitigate, or easily identify and address installation faults.