HVAC Talk of the Week: Optimising your Pump Design
Join our Energy Engineer Ruben as he delves into the captivating world of HVAC engineering, and discusses why it's important optimise your pump design.
Pumps are a vital part in your hydronic system as they are necessary to circulate flow in order to ensure an efficient heat transfer within your system. But pumps also consume electricity, and very often your pump energy consumption can be optimised by optimising your pump design.
Your pump energy consumption is determined by three factors: the pump efficiency, the pump pressure, and the flow rate within your system.
The efficiency of old pumps is typically very low. However, due to technological improvements, new pumps have efficiencies that can be up to 70% higher. Therefore, replacing your old pump can decrease your pump energy consumption by more than 40%.
The pump pressure is necessary in your system to provide sufficient lift to counteract the pressure losses. As the calculation of the pressure losses can be very complex, current practice often uses rules of thumb. However, there are always safety margins on these approximations and therefore calculating the pressure losses with the actual formula can further decrease your pump energy consumption by more than 20%.
Finally the flow rate of your system is directly related to the heat load. As the heat load varies over time, so can your flow rate. But in current practice, we often see that the flow rate is kept constant to its peak design condition. Therefore, changing this constant flow system to a variable flow system can further decrease your pump energy consumption by more than 50%.
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