Efficient Installation and Maintenance Practices for Residential HVAC Systems

by Rick Karg and John Krigger, 2000. Limited number of hard copies available through the Consortium for Energy Efficiency, Boston, Massachusetts.

Free download at

www.CEEforMT.org. Spiral-bound soft-cover, 62 pages plus supplement

As more efficient HVAC equipment has been developed, quality installation and maintenance have become pivotal to system performance. Recent research has shown that proper sizing and installation can improve air-conditioning and furnace system efficiencies by up to 35 and 16 percent, respectively! But despite the abundance of science and information on this critical issue from sources such as the Energy-Efficient Building Association (EEBA), DOE’s Building America program, and the Air-Conditioning Contractors Association (ACCA), there has been no comprehensive field guide with specifications for HVAC technicians—until now.

The Consortium for Energy Effi-ciency’s

Specification of Energy-Efficient Installation and Maintenance Practices for Residential HVAC Systems is a top-notch field guide for the residential HVAC industry, packed with comprehensive and detailed specifications, field test protocols, good references, and sidebars drawing out the key points of each section. The guide covers forced-air systems: air conditioners; heat pumps (both split and packaged systems); gas furnaces; and air handlers and ducting. The guide’s organization is surprisingly clear for such a complex topic—specification, verification, and benefits, with added rationale, diagrams, and photos split out into well-placed text and figure boxes. It’s not surprising that the list of authors and reviewers for this milestone publication reads like a who’s who of the building science community: Rick Karg, Doug Garrett, Chris Neme, Danny Parker and John Tooley, to name a few.

Denise Rouleau, the CEE project manager for the publication, states, “Perhaps the most important outcome of the publication is the near unanimous support it has garnered from key players in the residential HVAC industry—from DOE and EPA to ACCA and Pacific Gas and Electric.” A follow-up project to the installation guide is incorporation of its content into the database of questions used in the North American Technician Excellence (NATE) ACE exams. NATE is the leading nonprofit organization dedicated to the education and certification (through testing) of HVAC technicians and service contractors. (For more information on NATE, see their Web site:

www.natex.org.)The CEE installation and specification field guide should go a long way toward ensuring that the high-efficiency HVAC equipment available today is matched by quality installation and maintenance. This is an important publication, not only for HVAC service providers but also for designers and builders who must understand and properly plan for these installations.

– PY