Don’t get caught up in how the regulatory winds are blowing when planning an HVAC upgrade, says the CEO of a boiler manufacturer. Instead, look at your organization’s priorities, the life expectancy of your equipment and what type of fuel makes sense for you, says Chris Drew, CEO of Burnham Holdings, Inc.
“We were in an environment that was very pro-decarbonization through electrification, now with an administration that is much more pro fossil fuel,” Drew told Facilities Dive. “Facilities managers are struggling with what it means for them.”
It makes more sense to define what you’re trying to accomplish, he said. “Is it reduction in emissions or decarbonization? Is it better reliability and resilience? Is it better comfort? Is it a financial outcome to reduce cost in the building?”
Through its subsidiaries, Drew’s company manufactures high-efficiency steel and aluminum condensing boilers, industrial boilers, copper-finned boilers, cast iron and steel gas and oil boilers.
Drew recommends going into a life-cycle planning and capital expenditure decision with an “all is possible” approach and then looking at the specifics of your situation and the building you’re trying to manage.
Managers that need to stick with an older natural gas-fired boiler have plenty of options for getting more efficiency out of their system, he said. Even if a boiler shell is older, it can last a long time, and it can be outfitted with better burners, higher turndowns and more effective external reset controls to better match load to needs, he said.
“We can match that with variable span feeds, with variable speed pumps, with a variety of internal-to-the-boiler-room solutions that aren’t necessarily changing the system, but they are reducing the amount of fuel used,” he said.
Just changing out the burners and controls to get better control over combustion and putting in a bank of high-efficiency condensing boilers can provide 15% to 30% better fuel efficiency, he said.
“Right off the bat, you’re improving your decarbonization profile,” he said. On top of that, reprogramming the building management system allows very fine control of the heating, which can be used to extend the life of a product by balancing runtime, he said.
“Lots of fun stuff you could do with those boilers,” he said. “The technology is there. You probably have to reprogram based on if you’re using one big product or multiple small products. So much of this is application specific.”
Managers that invest in more sophisticated controls can consider better building management systems that enable them to dial in the amount of energy they’re actually using — for example, staged heating and cooling, or using a hybrid system more efficiently.
Drew’s company is developing its own control solution that enables the system, in a hybrid context, to decide the “optimum point” to convert over from a heat pump to a fossil fuel-based boiler, primarily based on temperature but also other factors like the cost of fuel or time of day.
“What’s the ‘best solution’ I can provide to reduce my cost?” Drew said. “These systems are expensive. They’re not free, and then you’ve got to have a sufficient payback.”
Managers can expect to get 20 years out of legacy-style steel products and use existing chimneys to vent. High-efficiency condensing products might only last 10 years and require multiple penetrations in the wall for venting. With “each penetration … you create another point for failure,” he said. “So looking at your life cycle and what you’re trying to achieve is incredibly important.”
Although facilities managers have shown an interest in hybrid electric-combustion systems to optimize their fuel choices, taking that approach creates integration issues, said Drew.
“The reality is, in a hybrid solution, you’re buying two systems,” he said. “You’re buying two complete systems that you’re trying to now integrate in a fashion that is cost-effective. Right out of the box, I think you’re at a cost disadvantage versus just selecting one direction and moving forward with it.”
Managers that want to put in a fully electrical system can face issues with scale. “You can’t put in a generator system that’s big enough to run a whole building from an electrical perspective,” he said.
It might, however, be possible to put in a generator system that’s big enough to run a boiler, because the electric draw for the pumps and the boiler itself would not be as large as a fully electric solution, he said. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t good electric solutions,” he said.
