by AF 1118 — November 23, 2009—The newest Advanced Energy Design Guide (AEDG) for Small Hospitals and Healthcare Facilities is the sixth in the AEDG series, designed to provide recommendations for achieving 30 percent energy savings over the minimum code requirements of ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-1999.
The Guide focuses on small healthcare facilities up to 90,000 square feet in size, including acute care facilities, outpatient surgery centers, critical access hospitals and inpatient community hospitals. These buildings have intensive heating and cooling systems, which the guide covers extensively; along with other important energy saving measures such as day lighting.
The energy efficiency recommendations in the Guide were developed based on design experiences from members of a project committee made up of healthcare facilities design professionals, combined with the insight gained from modeling the energy performance of these specific recommendations.
Among tips offered by the Guide:
- Providing an unoccupied air flow and temperature setback for spaces that are not used 24 hours a day, such as surgery suites;
- Installing high efficiency condensing boilers with an outdoor air temperature reset schedule for all climate zones to address the high amounts of reheat energy used by such facilities to control humidity;
- Carefully laying out lighting design to meet recommended lighting power density by space type;
- Maximizing the use of day lighting and day lighting-responsive controls through both side lighting and top lighting strategies in all space types that do not have air change requirements;
- Installing an insulated thermal envelope, with additional recommendations to address air barriers and continuous insulation strategies.
The Advanced Energy Design Guide series has been developed in collaboration with these partnering organizations: ASHRAE, the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES), the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
Since the Guides first began to be offered as free downloads at the beginning of 2008, more than 200,000 AEDGs have been downloaded. Other books in the series deal with small office and retail buildings, K-12 school buildings, highway lodging and small warehouse and self storage buildings.
For more information on the entire Advanced Energy Design Guide series, or to download a free copy, please see the Web site. A softback copy of the Guide can be purchased for $62 ($53, ASHRAE members) through ASHRAE.
For more information visit ASHRAE.
