Metal Sunscreen Fabrication Options To Enhance Your Commercial Building

Looking for ways to set your building apart? What if those enhancements could even save you money? Metal sunscreens not only add an element of design to any building facade, they also add many benefits to your building that may result in tremendous financial savings. They help reduce heat, glare and overall energy costs. They provide energy savings by minimizing direct solar gain through windows (requires less costly glazing) and reducing peak electricity demand. Studies also show that buildings utilizing these products increase worker productivity, lowers absenteeism and increases employee comfort. West Coast Metal Systems designs, fabricates, and ships quality horizontal and vertical metal sunscreens to anywhere in the western United States. We can also provide a variety of outrigger, blade, and attachment options for your unique aesthetic design. With in-house design and fabrication, we can produce custom products, at a fair price and deliver them in a fraction of the time of other fabricators.

Blades

Metal sunscreens are available with a variety of different blade options including flat, tube, ovals, round, square, crescent, tear-drop, perforated, rectangles, zee shape and “C” shape. Depending on the look and functionality you desire, West Coast Metal Systems can suggest a blade shape, size, and design appropriate for your project. With in-house design and fabrication, West Coast can create custom products at a fraction of the time and cost of other industry players.

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Q&a With Jasmine Hyman .

Director of Programs and Partnerships, The Gold Standard Foundation
Looking back at the first half of 2009, what has Gold Standard seen as the years most significant developments to date?
The most significant change at the Gold Standard is that weve tripled our staff and grown from a European to an international organization. I remember at the Carbon Expo in 2008 a participant said to us during our side event, You either need to grow or youll choke. At the time we had about 200 pending applicant projects. Now weve got 300 projects in our pipeline, technical expertise (we call them our Local Experts) in seven developing countries, and weve re-ignited our US programme with the hiring of Director of US Markets, Lisa Hodes. Ms. Hodes brings a strong legal and policy background to the team, and has already taken the U.S. by storm. In short, its been a big year.

What is the view from Europe on U.S. efforts to launch a cap and trade system? What do the prospects of the passage of a U.S. cap and trade regime mean to Gold Standard and to Gold Standard certified projects?

The Gold Standard tries to remain neutral to political developments; meaning, so long as the US gets on board somehow with a regulated cap and trade market, the Gold Standard (and the rest of the world) will be relieved. That said, it would be favorable if the US would sign onto a climate bill that could be complimentary to the existing global carbon market. Kyoto was ratified on February 16th 2005, and the market is still going through growing pains associated with building human capacity, securing ample validators and verifiers for projects, and implementing the projects themselves. It would be a shame to reinvent the wheel.

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Energy Savings Tips to Prepare Your Home for Solar Power

When you invest in solar panels for your home, you are making a commitment to reduce your carbon footprint while saving money on your monthly energy usage. In order to get the most out of your solar panels, you will want to take a few steps to reduce your overall energy usage every month. Following these simple steps will help you to create a more energy efficient home, allowing you to get the maximum benefit from your solar panels.

Replace Your Old Light Bulbs

Compact fluorescent light bulbs use less energy, making them a great alternative to traditional light bulbs. On average, CFL units last up to eight times as long as your existing light bulbs, so you can save money on replacements and electricity usage at the same time. Use these energy-savers wherever you can in your home to reduce the amount of electricity used when you flip your light switches.

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Air Conditioning Systems

Air conditioning refers to a system for controlling and regulating the humidity, ventilation and the temperature of a building or room for making it comfortable for the occupants. Air conditioning finds application in domestic, commercial and industrial fields.

Air conditioning also form an integral part of the medical and transportation sectors also, in both hospitals and transporting temperature fragile goods.

Conventional methods of air conditioning require a large energy source for maintaining the temperature. This translates into a high-energy requirement, high cost and high carbon dioxides emissions which has negative impacts both economically and with regard to the environment A break through in the air conditioning field came with the use of a new technology which makes use of the latent heat from the outside environment for controlling and regulating the indoor temperature. Using this technology Daikin has startled the Air conditioning industry with the production of its all-new Altherma! Daikins Altherma has high-energy use optimization.

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Fastest Growing Data Center Trend In 2013 Energy Efficiency

Energy efficiency continues to be a major concern for data centers with raised floor systems. In the past, energy cost was simply a given, on par with the costof hardware and labor. As hardware has become more efficient and automated procedures have taken over labor, the cost of energy has continued to climb and it now represents around 25% of total operating costs for most data centers. In most data centers, one of the biggest uses of energy involves the strategic cooling of equipment in conjunction with the raised floor system.

The typical data center uses nearly twice as much electricity as it needs for actual computing, with the remainder going toward cooling, lighting and systems that maintain the data center. One measure of this ratio of use is PUE, or power usage effectiveness, and a PUE of 1.0 is considered ideal. This means all of the power brought to the data center is used for computing, although this is not exactly an achievable goal.

The price of energy is such a large concern for data centers, they have gone to great lengths to optimize their PUE. The largest operators of data centers, Google and Facebook, have not only worked to make their data centers energy efficient. they have come close to this ideal PUE. Along the way, they have learned some valuable lessons to save energy. Their work has been amazing and shows the possibilities in new construction. However, it challenges the vast majority of older data centers with raised access floor. For data centers built 10 to 40 years ago, all hope is not lost. There are a number of ways to follow this trend without spending a fortune to take advantage of the lessons learned in energy efficiency.

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