Field Tests of Refit Equipment for Residential Oil-Fired Heating Systems

摘要

An energy conservation study of residential fuel oil savings obtained by the refit of existing boilers and furnaces was made by a one-year field test of 250 detached houses in a 5500 annual heating degree day climate. Retention-head burners properly installed on boilers produced savings of 18%; the addition of vent dampers or boiler temperature programmers to these systems yielded little increase in savings. With boilers using conventional burners, a controls package consisting of a double setback clock thermostat plus a boiler temperature programmer produced fuel savings of 19% in homes unoccupied during the day. With conventional burners the use of vent dampers, flue heat exchangers, or double setback thermostats produced typical savings of 10%. Retention-head burners yield 11% fuel savings with furnaces. The addition of vent dampers produced no further savings. For use in this project, a low cost method of calculating the annual fuel use in a building was developed that corrected for annual weather changes and for fuel use in heating domestic hot water. The data required were daily mean temperatures and fuel delivery dates and quantities; no instrumentation was used. The fuel use of thirty identical houses was traced through the periods of rapid oil price increases between 1977 and 1980; mean fuel use decreased each season but at a decreasing rate. (ERA citation 07:059673)