The Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA) has been working as part of a bi-national, cross-industry committee to revise the CSA Group’s P.8 standard for Thermal Efficiencies of Industrial and Commercial Gas-Fired Package Furnaces. The CSA P.8 revision is meant to more accurately represent the overall energy consumption of the entire commercial gas-fired packaged unit. To inform these revisions, this project used EnergyPlus simulations of commercial gas furnace equipment in typical building applications to better understand the operating modes and energy consumption of different equipment efficiencies and configurations during the heating season.
Cadeo Group, together with Energy 350, NEEA and the CSA P.8 Standards Committee used the data derived from 120 modeling scenarios (developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) to inform the development of a new, representative metric to more comprehensively describe commercial gas furnace performance. Specifically, the data facilitated evaluation of the extent to which the new metric represents actual rooftop unit operation and also yielded weights for proper balancing of each operating mode in the test method.
