Office Temperature Equalizers

fan

Spend $166 now and SAVE $120 each year... ROI = 72.3%

Now you can move air between offices to add comfort during cooling or heating seasons. Heating and cooling make up abour 42% of an office's annual energy costs, so rather than adding an Air Conditioning unit in a window or a space heater to adjust for offices or conference rooms that are either stuffy or too cool, you can insert a Thru Wall 'Room to Room' fan. These fans can be hard wired to a switch or easily plugged into an outlet. They fit into a hole with a diameter of only 8”. With a Thru Wall 'room to room' fan, you may not need to incur the initial cost of space heaters or window air conditioners and then the the significant additional cost of the energy needed to power the equipment. The average cost of a Thru Wall Fan is $66 and the seasonal operating cost is under $20.

By comparison, an AC window unit may cost several hundred dollars and cost over $100 to operate. The cost of a space heater is between, $50 and $90 so the average is comparable to the cost of a Thru Wall Fan, but running a space heater over a winter season costs about $100. Here are some details on space heater operating costs. An average space heater runs on 1800 watts, and at 40 hours/week it uses 72 Kilowatt Hours (kWh) per week. A Kilowatt Hour is 1,000 watts of energy used over an hour. So 1 kWh is needed to power ten 100 Watt light bulbs for an hour.

To put it in perspective, running a space heater for an hour is equivalent to powering 18 100 watt light bulbs for an hour, or powering over 50 Compact Fluorescent Lights. The kWh costs vary across US regional and power utility companies, but a kWh typically costs between $.10 and $.15 with $.12 as the US average cost. So, running a space heater for each of the five eight-hour work days of the week costs $8.64 (72 kWh x $.12/KWh). The monthly cost is $34.56, and over three months of a winter you could spend over $100. So, if any of your employees need the additional heat, this data may help you weigh the offset cost of an alternative solution such as adding thru wall fans to equalize temperatures.

Simply, Thru Wall Fans can be very effective at moving air from a common area into an overly cold/hot office or to equalize the air temperature between two offices. If you need more temperature equalizing you can always use a space heater or AC unit, but they will not have to 'work' as hard. You can also look into balancing the whole system with Multi Temperature control Zones, but that has a much larger cost implication.

The ROI Calculation is based on saving $80 per season over the cooling season and $80 over the heating season with an operating cost of $20 for each season for a total saving of $120 per year. The initial hardware cost is $66 with the average installation cost of $100. Naturally if you cut the hole and plug it in yourself, the ROI is even greater. The savings obviously scale accordingly if you have more than one office that is too cold or too hot and needs temperature equalizing.

Payback Time in Years:  Added Cost: Annual SAVINGS 5 Year SAVINGS Return on Investment (ROI):
1.4 $166 $120 $600 72.3%

 

However, to create save even greater savings as air-conditioning usually is the largest consumer of electricity for commercial properties  include algorithms to optimize commercial air conditioning performance.  Learn more at HVAC Optimization

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