Did you know that on an average, 30-40% of energy in a commercial building is consumed by HVAC systems?

By becoming more energy efficient in HVAC, commercial buildings can reduce OPEX, increase property asset value and enhance staff comfort.

In this module, we will give you more knowledge and background about:

- Installation, commissioning and integration of your HVAC system to Building Management Systems, or BMS; and,
- How to optimise this process and make it faster and easier.

Installation, commissioning and integration of components and/or solutions to a BMS system are the final activities before putting an HVAC system into operation and handing it over to the client. However, this is often where mistakes occur, good practices are neglected, and procedures not carried out.

Let’s look at one of the challenges that we have identified as important for combatting these issues – that is, how to improve the time-consuming balancing and commissioning process.

One of the root causes to this challenge is often the sheer number and types of installed balancing valves, meaning the balancing and commissioning process often takes a long time and increases the risk the system is not being properly balanced – if at all. Ultimately, this will result in poor indoor climate and comfort which might lead to reduced occupant satisfaction.

However, Grundfos can resolve these issues with the ground-breaking distributed pumping approach that substitutes balancing and control valves, bypass valves and secondary pumps.

By using distributed pumps, the system is balanced automatically by the Grundfos pumps located in the system at every consumer loop, such as air handlers or VAV-boxes.

Primary pump control can be fully integrated into the building’s BMS-system. In addition, this approach lets you reduce the required performance of primary pumps with up to 50%.

We have seen how the distributed pumping concept results in significant capital and operational savings, because:
- balancing and control valves are made redundant;
- primary pump performance requirements can be reduced to half;
- the system is self-balanced needing no time-consuming balancing and commissioning process; and therefore,
- indoor climate and occupant comfort are increased.

That concludes this module about how the Grundfos distributed pumping solution optimises HVAC systems by making the commissioning process redundant.