“Kleinkinderschule in Amsterdam” 1880 / Max Liebermann
This ASHRAE consensus product specifies conditions for acceptable thermal environments and is intended for use in design, operation, and commissioning of buildings and other occupied spaces. It is impossible to underestimate the difficulty of engineering an acceptable room temperature in an educational setting that satisfies all people all the time. Today, we simply identify the opportunity to ASHRAE Standard 55-2017, Thermal Environmental Conditions for Human Occupancy poststed on ASHRAE’s Public Review page:
ASHRAE’s standards development platform is one of the fastest in the United States so frequently there is scant time to respond; though we hope other user-interests will. As technical specifics relevant to the education facility industry become more clear we will develop this page accordingly.
All ASHRAE consensus products are on the agenda of our monthly 11 AM/ET Mechanical Engineering and Energy standards teleconferences. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
HVACequipment for a building is one of the major sources of interior noise, and its effect on the acoustical environment is important. Further, noise from equipment located outdoors often propagates to the community. Therefore, mechanical equipment must be selected, and equipment spaces designed, with an emphasis on both the intended uses of the equipment and the goal of providing acceptable sound levels in occupied spaces of the building and in the surrounding community. Operation of HVAC equipment can also induce mechanical vibration that propagates into occupied spaces through structureborne paths such as piping, ductwork, and mounts. Vibration can cause direct discomfort and also create secondary radiation of noise from vibrating walls, floors, piping, etc.
In this chapter, sound and noise are used interchangeably, although only unwanted sound is considered to be noise.
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Related ASHRAE titles:
ASHRAE 55 – Thermal Environmental Conditions for Human Occupancy: While this standard primarily deals with thermal comfort, it also includes guidance on acceptable indoor noise levels in occupied spaces.
ASHRAE 62.1 – Ventilation for Acceptable Indoor Air Quality: This standard includes requirements for noise levels associated with ventilation systems and their components.
ASHRAE 68 – Methods of Testing to Determine the Sound Power of HVAC Equipment: This standard provides procedures for testing and measuring the sound power levels of various HVAC equipment.
ASHRAE 130 – Methods of Testing Air-Cleaning Devices Used in General Ventilation for Removing Particulate Matter: Though focused on air-cleaning devices, this standard also addresses the sound performance of these devices.
ASHRAE 174 – Sound Measurement and Characteristics of HVAC Equipment: This standard provides guidance on sound measurement techniques and performance criteria for HVAC equipment.
These standards aim to ensure that HVAC&R systems and equipment operate efficiently and provide a comfortable indoor environment while minimizing excessive noise levels and potential acoustic issues. They play a vital role in promoting occupant comfort and overall building performance in terms of noise control and sound quality.
During today’s colloquium we audit the literature that sets the standard of care for mechanical engineering design, construction operations and maintenance. Mechanical systems — which includes building service engineering* — runs upwards of 35 percent of new building construction. After architectural disciplines that produce the building envelope, the mechanical disciplines dominate technical considerations for building and maintaining education community physical spaces. The requirements that affect cost change on a near-daily basis and now given heightened scrutiny of building air flow patterns with the circumstances of the pandemic.
For the moment, we co-locate plumbing and mechanical system consensus products in the same group.
We track standards setting in the bibliographies of the following organizations:
AHRI | Air Conditioning, Heating & Refrigeration Institute
AIHA | American Industrial Hygiene Association
ASHRAE | American Society of Heating & Refrigeration Engineers
ASME | American Society of Mechanical Engineers
ASPE | American Association of Plumbing Engineers
ASTM | American Society for Testing & Materials
AWS | American Welding Society
AWWA | American Water Works Association
AHRI | Air Conditioning, Heating & Refrigeration Institute
IAPMO | International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials
ICC | International Code Council
IEC | International Electrotechnical Commission
IMC | International Mechanical Code
IPC | International Plumbing Code
ISEA | International Safety Equipment Association
ISO | International Organization for Standardization
NFPA | National Fire Protection Association
SEFA | Scientific Equipment & Furniture Association
SMACNA | Sheet Metal Contractors National Association
UL | Underwriters Laboratories
(All relevant OSHA Standards)
It is a large domain. Through 2024 we will break down our inquiries thus:
* Building services engineers are responsible for the design, installation, operation and monitoring of the technical services in buildings (including mechanical, electrical and public health systems, also known as MEP or HVAC), in order to ensure the safe, comfortable and environmentally friendly operation. Building services engineers work closely with other construction professionals such as architects, structural engineers and quantity surveyors. Building services engineers influence the architectural design of building, in particular facades, in relation to energy efficiency and indoor environment, and can integrate local energy production (e.g. façade-integrated photovoltaics) or community-scale energy facilities (e.g. district heating). Building services engineers therefore play an important role in the design and operation of energy-efficient buildings (including green buildings, passive houses and zero energybuildings. uses. With buildings accounting for about a third of all carbon emissions] and over a half of the global electricity demand, building services engineers play an important role in the move to a low-carbon society, hence mitigate global warming.
George Herman Babcock — through his patents of pumps, steam engines, and novel boiler designs with collaborator Stephen Wilcox — raised the standard for safe boiler design & operation.https://t.co/qakAw4jfCnpic.twitter.com/3rCxXHkBfM
Legionella risk is a domain rich in possibilities for lawsuits so we should not be surprised that best practice titles in the ASHRAE suite — and other standards bibliographies — go unstable with new findings. We encourage facility units in education communities to contribute data to technical committees and to participate directly. you may access titles open for public comment at the link below:
ASHRAE runs one of the best public consultation facilities in the United States. Its titles appear in most of our daily colloquia; this one best practice titles are on the standing agendas of our Energy, Mechanical, Water 200/Water 400 and Risk colloquia. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
Columbia University
Issue: 12-42
Category: Mechanical Engineering, Occupational Health & Safety, Water
Colleagues: Richard Robben, Ron George, Larry Spielvogel
This is a significant ASHRAE achievement and we do not mind saying so.
The original University of Michigan standards advocacy enterprise began participating in ASHRAE 201 Facility Smart Grid Information Model as a user-interest from 2012 until the end of 2016. Other US-based accredited standards developers in electrotechnology — such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and the National Electrical Manufacturers Association — compete in the “smart grid” space. We follow them too; commenting when we can, collaborating with the IEEE Education & Healthcare Facilities Committee.
As the largest non-residential building construction market in the United States, the education facility industry should contribute meaningfully (with data, insight, pilot-sites, faculty and staff support, etc.) to all standards developers to help them improve their products.
ASHRAE 201 is a solid product in a complex space noteworthy for its technical specifics); its purpose reproduced below:
“FOREWORD. The effort to substantially modernize and transform the national electric grid and create what has become known as a “smart grid” is an enormous undertaking that reflects both the size and importance of the electric grid. Viewed in its entirety, it is an international effort involving hundreds of organizations and companies, and it will impact billions of people. The standards infrastructure that will be needed to support this transformation may include over one hundred standards by the time that it is fully in place. This standard is one part of that infrastructure.
Almost all electricity is consumed in a building of some kind – homes, retail establishments, offices, schools, factories, hospitals – the list goes on. This standard attempts to capture the breadth and diversity of these consumers by using the term “facility.” A facility is any kind of building or collection of buildings, and all of the electrical loads or local generation sources contained within them or controlled by the facility owner.
Historically, electricity consumption has been viewed as a collection of dumb loads at the end of a distribution system. There has been almost no interaction between the “loads” and those responsible for electricity generations and distribution. The vision of the smart grid changes this picture radically. In a smart grid world, facilities become full partners in supporting and managing the electric grid. Facilities become generators using local renewable or other generation capacity. Facilities moderate electrical demand in response to fluctuations in the price or [availability]sp of electricity. Facilities communicate and negotiate with energy providers, sharing information about the facility’s projected electrical demand or ability to respond to the energy provider’s needs for maintaining grid stability and reliability.
In some respects all facilities have common characteristics and needs with respect to interactions with a smart grid, regardless of whether the facility is a commercial, institutional, or industrial building, or a private home. The Facility Smart Grid Information Model (FSGIM) standard attempts to capture this commonality and standardize the content of the information that a facility manager needs to have, or, in some cases, needs to exchange with the energy provider, in order to manage the facility. Energy providers benefit from the FSGIM standard because it enables interaction with all different types of facilities in a common way. Facility owners benefit because products can be designed for use in multiple facility types and products designed primarily for one type of facility, a home for example, can more easily be used in another, say a commercial building.
An information model is an abstraction, not an implementation. This abstract representation is a way to account for the reality that the technology used to manage a facility may be quite different depending on the type of facility. It is intended that the FSGIM will be used to develop or enhance other standards that define technology and communication protocol specific implementations of the model for particular markets.
The FSGIM was developed in the context of a much larger framework of smart grid standards. It builds on some of those standards in a way that is intended to maintain consistency and harmony with established and developing standards that impact the information needed to managing the facility, while at the same time capturing all of the key information needed in one place.
If the smart grid is to become a reality there must be smart facilities of all types that interact with it. The considerable time and talent that went into developing the FSGIM was invested in order to lay a solid foundation upon which to fulfill this vision.”
Campus environmental automation units — building automation and control staff — take note. Today, we simply identify the opportunity to review the updated 837-page document whole cloth and encourage our colleagues running building environmental units to participate directly on ASHRAE Public Commenting platform, linked below:
At the moment, as of this posting, this standard appears to be stabilized.
Comments are due December 16th.
All ASHRAE consensus products are on the agenda of our periodic Energy and Mechanical colloquia. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
Colleagues: David B. Anderson, David Conrad, Mike Anthony, Jim Harvey, Larry Spielvogel, Ted Weidner
“Hudson River Waterfront” | Colin Campbell Cooper (1913)
With about one hundred technical committees administered by accredited standards developers globally, the stream of standards action in the building energy conservation space is one of the fastest-moving; and a space that demonstrates remarkable adaption. As the largest non-residential building construction market in the United States the education facility industry is on the receiving end of prescriptive and performance requirements produced by these technical committees that are enforced by state agencies and/or sustainability consortia. There is market-making by incumbents whose revenue stream runs close coupled to the US education industry’s green agenda. We do our best to keep pace.
Public consultation periods run April 3 through April 23.
We maintain ASHRAE 189.1 on the standing agenda of our Mechanical Engineering, Energy 200, Health and Nota Bene teleconferences. If you would like to pick through these mark ups see our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
It defines data communication services and protocols for computer equipment used for monitoring and control of HVAC&R and other building systems
It defines an abstract, object-oriented representation of information communicated between such equipment, thereby facilitating the application and use of digital control technology in buildings.
Since the late 1970’s these systems have grown from single building control networks for environment air into multi-building campus-wide systems that conform to the ISO model of layered communication architecture. Every large research university has long since installed facility management unit that monitors and controls points such as outdoor air intake, wet-bulb temperature, occupancy load, elevator action, time of day, outdoor lighting etc. The University of Michigan, for example, monitors and controls nearly 1 million control points on its 6 square mile Ann Arbor campus.
The ASHRAE 135 technical committee has released a consultation on addendum cd regarding cipher suite application security profiles. Several redlines are now open for public consultation and may be found here:
Consultation on several titles is open until March 20th.
This title, and several others in the ASHRAE catalog, are on the standing agenda of our Energy 200 and Energy 400 colloquium. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
New update alert! The 2022 update to the Trademark Assignment Dataset is now available online. Find 1.29 million trademark assignments, involving 2.28 million unique trademark properties issued by the USPTO between March 1952 and January 2023: https://t.co/njrDAbSpwBpic.twitter.com/GkAXrHoQ9T
