ATLANTA - A new Advanced Energy Design Guide (AEDG) for Small Hospitals and Healthcare Facilities is the sixth in the AEDG series. It is designed to provide recommendations for achieving 30 percent energy savings over the minimum code requirements of ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-1999.

The AEDG series has been developed in collaboration with the following partnering organizations: the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), American Institute of Architects (AIA), Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES), U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

“The recommendations in the Small Hospitals and Healthcare Facilities Guide provide good design practices for integrating energy efficiency in a health care environment, while maintaining indoor air quality and required airflow and pressurization relationships,” said Shanti Pless, chair of committee that wrote the guide.

The guide focuses on small health care facilities up to 90,000 square feet in size, including acute care facilities, outpatient surgery centers, critical access hospitals, and inpatient community hospitals. These buildings have intensive heating and cooling systems, which the guide covers in detail; additionally, other energy saving measures such as daylighting are included.

“The energy efficiency recommendations in the guide were developed based on design experiences from members of a project committee made up of health care facilities design professionals, combined with the insight gained from modeling the energy performance of these specific recommendations,” Pless said.

Some tips that the guide offers include:

• Providing an unoccupied airflow and temperature setback for spaces that are not used 24 hours a day, such as surgery suites;

• Installing high-efficiency condensing boilers with an outdoor air temperature reset schedule for all climate zones to address the high amounts of reheat energy used by such facilities to control humidity;

• Carefully laying out lighting design to meet recommended lighting power density by space type;

• Maximizing the use of daylighting and daylighting-responsive controls through both sidelighting and toplighting strategies in all space types that do not have air change requirements;

• Installing an insulated thermal envelope, with additional recommendations to address air barriers and continuous insulation strategies.

For more information on the Advanced Energy Design Guide, or to download a free copy, visit www.ashrae.org/freeaedg. A softback copy of the guide may be purchased for $62 ($53, ASHRAE members). To order, contact ASHRAE Customer Service at 800-527-4723 (United States and Canada) or 404-636-8400 (worldwide), fax 404-321-5478, or visit www.ashrae.org/bookstore.

Publication date:12/07/2009