Advance Energy Design Guidance Offered for Small Hospitals and Healthcare Facilities

Written by a group of leading building industry organizations, the newest Advanced Energy Design Guide (AEDG) for Small Hospitals and Healthcare Facilities is the sixth in the 30 percent AEDG series, designed to provide recommendations for achieving 30 percent energy savings over the minimum code requirements of ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-1999.

The guide focuses on small healthcare facilities up to 90,000 square feet in size, including acute care facilities, outpatient surgery centers, critical access hospitals, and inpatient community hospitals. These buildings have intensive heating and cooling systems, which the guide covers extensively. Additionally, other important energy saving measures such as daylighting are included.

“The recommendations in the Small Hospital and Healthcare Facilities Guide provide good design practices for integrating energy efficiency in a healthcare environment, while maintaining indoor air quality and required airflow and pressurization relationships,” says Shanti Pless, chair of the committee that wrote the guide.

The guide also recommends providing an unoccupied airflow and temperature setback for spaces that are not used 24 hours a day, such as surgery suites; installing high efficiency condensing boilers with an outdoor air temperature reset schedule for all climate zones to address high amounts of reheat energy used by such facilities to control humidity; carefully laying out lighting design to meet recommended lighting power density by space type; maximizing the use of daylighting and daylighting-responsive controls through both sidelighting and toplighting strategies in all space types that do not have air change requirements; and installing an insulated thermal envelope, with additional recommendations to address air barriers and continuous insulation strategies.

The recommendations allow contractors, consulting engineers, architects, and designers to easily achieve advanced levels of energy savings without having to resort to detailed calculations or analyses.

The AEDG for Small Hospitals and Healthcare Facilities was written in collaboration with ASHRAE, the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES), the USGBC, and the U.S. Department of Energy, and it includes case studies to provide excellent examples of advanced hospital and healthcare facility designs that demonstrate the flexibility offered in achieving advanced energy savings.

For more information on the entire Advanced Energy Design Guide series, or to download a free copy, please visit www.ashrae.org/freeaedg. Soft copies of the guide are also available for purchase at www.ashrae.org/bookstore.