Choosing Data Loggers for Your Green Building Project

Environmental Construction and Energy Projects Require High-Accuracy Devices

CHESTERLAND OH - The green building industry is growing quickly, and successful projects benefit from assessment and evaluation from start to finish. From hospitals to industrial operations to single-family homes, measurements of conditions such as temperature, solar radiation, and energy consumption are essential to carrying out and testing your designs.

Today's data loggers are small, low-cost, rugged devices that record unattended indoor and outdoor measurements at user-specified intervals 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Indoor units are already in common use by performance contractors and engineers responsible for monitoring energy efficiency and usage, air quality, and heating ventilation/air conditioning/refrigeration (HVAC/R). Weather stations are used outdoors worldwide by research scientists and farmers for collecting environmental data such as rainfall, wind speed, and solar radiation.

Whether you are an experienced data logger user or are just getting started, this guide from the Applications Specialists at CAS DataLoggers will help you to understand how data loggers fit into the green building industry, and will also give advice about several areas to consider when selecting a logger best suited for your particular needs.

How Data Loggers Fit In

The goals of green building are to increase building efficiency with regard to energy, materials, and water use; to take advantage of natural resources such as solar radiation and wind; and to lessen the environmental impact of building siting, construction, and operation. In practice, some designs address all these factors, while other buildings incorporate just a few.

Data loggers can provide valuable information for nearly every aspect and scale of green design. For example, a facilities manager can monitor temperature in a fifteen story office building over the summer to check whether the fans in the building's cooling tower need adjustment.

A homeowner considering adding passive solar hot water panels to his roof can deploy a weather station first to determine where solar radiation is most intense, and how many sunny days there are per year. Engineers can monitor energy use in a retrofitted elementary school to make sure that new lighting and appliances are actually cutting electricity costs.

In an effort to create a national industry standard, the US Green Building Council (www.usgbc.org) created the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. This system serves as a guide for measuring and documenting successful green building practices at all phases of a building's lifecycle. Guidelines cover site selection, new construction, renovation, and occupancy/facilities management, and can apply from homes to entire neighborhoods. Data logging devices are valuable during the LEED Certification process because documentation is required by the USGBC every step of the way, and data loggers can provide you with valuable data, from design concept to operation.

Choosing a Data Logger for Green Design Applications

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Choosing Data Loggers for Your Green Building Project