HRES Solar Thermal

On Friday, Andrea Ruedy Trimble, Jessica Parks, Carol Healy, Zhen Wu, Mitch Hunter, and Fady Ghattas of the Harvard Office for Sustainability took a tour of the solar thermal installations on 472-474 Broadway and 20-20a Prescott Streets in Cambridge. Bjorn Storz of Harvard Real Estate Services lead the tour. There are 14 flat plate collectors on the two roofs and they are expected to provide 30 to 40% of the domestic water demand. The solar planels collect heat through a glycol loop which is pumpted to plate frame heat exchangers in the basements. From there a water loop transfers heat to storage tanks. Finally, another set of plate fram heat exchangers transfers the heat to pre-heat the domestic water, which receives additioanl heating from natural gas boilers. The installation is expected to reduce GHG emissions by 13 MTCDE per year and save 2,300 therms of natural gas.

The systems performance is being tracked real time and available on the web. The public is invited to track the performance of the system by visiting http://harvard_prescott.heizwerk.at/ and logging in with username "frei" and password "frei". Solid Solar, the manufacturers, are continuing to monitor the system from Germany and making slight tweeks to the controls to optimize its performance.

Everybody on the Office for Sustainability staff enjoyed the tour and hopes to see more such installations on roofs around Harvard and elsewhere.

Read more.

Holyoke Wind Turbines

Early this year, Harvard Real Estate Services installed 6 of the AeroVironment AVX1000 architectural wind turbines. Each of the parapet mounted turbines is rated for 1 kilowatt and can spin in winds as slow as 4 mph. Last week I took some time after a meeting to take a few pictures and they were spinning rapidly. While in the meeting in the building's 10th (top) floor minutes before taking the pictures, I didn't notice any noise or vibration. The turbines' inverter has not been connected to the internet yet, but when it is we will be able to monitor their effectiveness.

More information can be found here.

Commissioning 10 Akron St.

This picture shows Kevin Short of Facility Dynamics Engineering verifying the temperature and pressure inside the Harvard Real Estate Services 10 Akron Street dormitory. Tim Scruby is on the other end of the walkie talkie confirming that the building management system is giving the same readings.