Application Study of the Pump Water Flow Station for Building Energy Consumption Monitoring and Control Optimization

Abstract

This paper presents a new building energy monitoring and pump speed control method. The pump speed is controlled to maintain the system resistance at an optimized value to approach the best pump efficiency and save pump power. The system resistance can be obtained by the pump head and the water flow rate calculated by the pump water-flow station (PWS), which was recently developed. The PWS measures the water flow rate using the pump head, pump speed, and pump performance curve. This method has been experimentally proved in real HVAC systems. A case study was demonstrated in this paper for application of this new method in a Continuous Commissioning (CC) practice. The case study shows that the PWS can control the pump speed to maintain the optimized system operating point. It can also measure the water flow rate and monitor energy consumption continuously with low installation and almost no maintenance cost. The results show that the new technology can save pump power and increase pump efficiency significantly.