Construction Tech Review | Friday, June 14, 2024
WESTWOOD, Mass., : enVerid Systems, a leading provider of solutions to reduce the cost and carbon emissions of heating, ventilating, and air conditioning buildings, announced today the HLR 100Z, the newest addition to enVerid's family of HVAC Load Reduction® (HLR®) modules, extending the reach of enVerid's products to the individual building zone. Similar in size and sound to Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) terminal units, the HLR 100Z easily fits inside most plenums and mechanical spaces serving one or more zones. The HLR 100Z works with most commercial building HVAC systems and is ideally suited for those served by VRF, active chilled beams, water source heat pumps, and other de-coupled heating and cooling systems. The HLR 100Z may be used to reduce outside airflow, heating and cooling load, electrical load, refrigerant charge, system weight, and cost – resulting in savings on equipment and energy use and lower carbon emissions.
The HLR 100Z is the newest and most compact module in enVerid’s award-winning HLR product family. At the core of all HLR modules is enVerid’s innovative Sorbent Ventilation Technology (SVT). SVT filters harmful gaseous contaminants from indoor air, reducing the need for expensive, energy-intensive outside air ventilation to maintain indoor air quality.
When applied with ASHRAE's IAQ Procedure, the HLR 100Z can make building electrification goals easier and more cost-effective to achieve. Each HLR 100Z can offset 3-15 tons of peak cooling load and reduce HVAC energy use by up to 40 percent. This in turn can reduce HVAC system electrical requirements by up to 40 amps, refrigerant charge by up to 10 pounds, and system cost by up to 30 percent. The HLR 100Z can also be used to earn up to nine LEED points in the Indoor Environmental Quality, Energy & Atmosphere, and Innovation credit areas using the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED BD+C Minimum Indoor Air Quality Performance: IAQP Compliance Path pilot credit.
"As the market has moved to smaller, decentralized HVAC system designs, enVerid has responded with new products to simplify and expand the applications that can be served with our innovative Sorbent Ventilation Technology that is at the core of all HLR modules," said Christian Weeks, CEO of enVerid Systems. "In 2023 we launched the HLR 100C to expand from the applied market into the packaged rooftop market. With the addition of the HLR 100Z for smaller zones, we now have a cost-effective solution to implement Sorbent Ventilation Technology and ASHRAE's IAQ Procedure across the entire commercial HVAC market including the rapidly growing segment of the market served by VRF, active chilled beams, water source heat pumps, and other decentralized heating and cooling systems."
enVerid's Sorbent Ventilation Technology® (SVT®) filters harmful gaseous contaminants from indoor air, reducing the need for expensive, energy-intensive outside air ventilation to maintain indoor air quality. Reducing outside air requirements using SVT and ASHRAE's IAQ Procedure in Standard 62.1 supports building decarbonization and electrification goals by reducing equipment size to save on first costs and by lowering ventilation energy use to improve efficiency. Reducing outside air ventilation also makes buildings more resilient to polluted outside air including from wildfires.
The initial market response to the HLR 100Z has been extremely positive owing to its compact size and flexible integration options. "enVerid continues to innovate, engineering its HLR modules into smaller form factors to broaden the HVAC applications served with SVT," said Alex Goodwin, SVP Products & Engineering at enVerid. "With a focus on smaller-scale spaces, the new HLR 100Z delivers the benefits of SVT and the IAQ Procedure to decentralized HVAC systems such as VRVs that are increasingly in demand."
Recent updates to ASHRAE standards make design and implementation of all HLR modules easy for the engineer and cost-effective in today's pressing ventilation scenarios:
•Addendum aa to 62.1-2019 (Feb 2022) – made the IAQ Procedure more prescriptive by defining contaminants of concern, design limits, and post occupancy testing requirements.
•Addendum n to 62.1-2022 (Oct 2022) – raised the bar for compliant air cleaning technologies like SVT by defining specific test procedures to measure cleaning efficacy.
•Addendum c to 62.1-2022 (Oct 2023) – made applying the IAQ Procedure much easier for engineers by providing an Excel calculator to calculate outside air requirements using the IAQ Procedure.
A recent peer reviewed ASHRAE paper analyzed the impact on cost, energy consumption, and carbon emissions of different ventilation strategies for commercial and education spaces that comply with Standard 62.1 (normal operations), Standard 241 ("infection risk management mode" or IRMM), and ASHRAE's proposed Guideline 44 ("wildfire smoke mode" or WFSM). The paper found that ventilation strategies that use the IAQ Procedure require the least energy, emit the least carbon, and are the only strategies that comply with both infection risk management mode and wildfire smoke mode. Over 1,000 enVerid HLR modules have been field installed in full compliance with the latest version of the IAQ Procedure.
The HLR 100Z is the most compact module in enVerid's award-winning family of HLR products which also include the HLR 100C (integrated with rooftop curbs and inside AHR/RTU cabinets), HLR 100M (for indoor mechanical spaces), HLR 200M (for indoor mechanical spaces where CO2 is a concern), and HLR 200R (for rooftop and other outdoor applications). The HLR 100C was a 2024 nominee for Consulting-Specifying Engineer's Product of the Year in the HVAC category, the HLR 100M was named Product of the Year in the HVAC category in 2021 by the readers of Consulting-Specifying Engineer, and the HLR 200M received the AHR Expo Product of the Year Award in 2019.
