CFL with Bayonet Cap

A compact fluorescent lamp (CFL), also known as a compact fluorescent light or energy saving light (or less commonly as a compact fluorescent tube [CFT]), is a type of fluorescent lamp. Many CFLs are designed to replace an incandescent lamp and can fit into most existing light fixtures formerly used for incandescents.

Now, the CFL with bayonet cap is available in most of the Malaysian retail store and hypermarket. So incandescent lamp can easily replace without changing the socket. The price it is around RM 18 - RM23 (18W).

18 W CFL = 100W incandescent lamp

.: Time to Change :.

Sources of Indoor Pollution

Paint

Lead paint is a fairly well-known danger, 30-odd years after the U.S. banned it. Older homes, however, still have lead paint on the walls, and the deteriorating, cracking and peeling paint can produce lead-tainted dust that can easily get on children's hands ... and childrens' hands, as any parent knows, are a remarkably efficient delivery method for getting anything to their mouths. Lead can cause permanent brain damage, so maintaining old paint is critically important.

Carpets

Carpets harbor dirt, dust mites, pet dander, dirt, fungus and other unhealthy particles that can irritate the lungs, trigger asthma attacks or send some people into allergic fits.

Less obvious is the presence of suspect chemicals used to manufacture carpets that "off gas" and can fill the room. The most common is formaldehyde, which will not only irritate the nose and throat, trigger asthma attacks and cause other lung damage, but could, based on laboratory studies on animals, cause cancer, according to the EPA.

Carpets are concerning enough that the American Lung Association recommends avoiding them completely. (If you already have one, the association recommends using a HEPA [high efficiency particle air] vacuum.) There are carpets on the market that are made with nontoxic materials (though they can still harbor dirt, dust and dander like any other rug).

Cleaning Products

Spray bottles, sponges and the cleansers that break up dirt are supposed to leave your home cleaner, but many can also introduce unhealthy compounds into the air.

The first thing that must be said is: Never mix a chlorine-based cleanser with an acid-based cleanser, like vinegar or ammonia. Don't even clean the same surface with one and then the other. The result of mixing these two cleansers is potent -- often deadly -- chlorine gas. That's the same chlorine gas that ties counter-terrorism experts up in knots. You don't want it in your house.

The larger point, though, is that many off-the-shelf cleansers contain powerful and often toxic solvents, antibiotic pesticides and other nasty chemicals. Chlorine is poisonous. Many household cleansers are unnecessarily hazardous, given that simple recipes with vinegar, baking soda and the like will do just as good a job without any of the risks.

Cabinets and Furniture

Cabinets, furniture, shelving, countertops and any other household item made with pressed wood is likely stuck together with glue that contains formaldehyde.

As with rugs, the formaldehyde in the glue will "off-gas" over time, releasing small amounts into the air in your home.

To avoid formaldehyde, avoid pressed wood products unless you know they are free from formaldehyde.

The Kitchen Stove

Just the simple act of cooking on the stove, particularly a gas stove, can actually introduce unsafe levels of nitrogen dioxide into the air, increasing the risk of asthma attacks and other respiratory illness. Also a concern is simple steam, which can do the same work as moisture in the bathroom at promoting unwanted mold growth.

The better solution is simply to properly ventilate your stove so that the exhaust vents to the outdoors.

Energy Star qualified equipmets and appliances

ENERGY STAR is an international standard for energy efficient consumer products. It was first created as a United States government program in 1992, but Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Taiwan and the European Union have also adopted the program. Devices carrying the Energy Star logo, such as computer products and peripherals, kitchen appliances, buildings and other products, save 20%-30% on average.

However, many European-targeted products are labeled using a different standard, TCO Certification, a combined energy usage and ergonomics rating from the Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees (TCO) instead of Energy Star.




LEED 2009 For Commercial Interior (LEED 2009 CI)

In LEED 2009 CI, for EA Credit 1.4: Optimize Energy Performance - Equipment and Appliances, the requirement is as below:

For all Energy Star qualified equipments and appliances installed as part of the tenant's scope of work, archieve one of the following percentage (by rated power):

1 point - 70%
2 points - 77%
3 points - 84%
4 points - 90%

This requirement applies to appliances, office equipment, electronics and commercial food service equipment. Excluded are HVAC, lighting and building envelope products.

Energy Star qualified equipment and appliances

This is the logo for Energy Star qualified equipment and appliances

ENERGY STAR specifications differ with each item, and are set by either the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Energy. The following highlights product and specification information available on the ENERGY STAR website.

Computers

New Energy Star 5.0 specifications for computers became effective on July 1 2009. They require the use of 80 PLUS Bronze level or higher power supplies.

Servers

The EPA released Version 1.0 of the Computer Server specifications on May 15, 2009. It covers standalone servers with one to four processor sockets. A second tier to the specification covering servers with more than four processor sockets, as well as blade servers and fault-tolerant machines is expected in late 2010.

Appliances

As of early 2008, average refrigerators need 20% savings over the minimum standard. Dishwashers need at least 41% savings. Most appliances as well as heating and cooling systems have a yellow EnergyGuide label showing the annual cost of operation compared to other models. This label is created through the Department of Energy and often shows if an appliance is ENERGY STAR.

List of the Energy Star qualified equipments and appliances. Click Link


Energy Star Saving Calculator

Natural Swimming Pools

Swimming can be great exercise and a lot of fun, not to mention an exciting sport at the Olympics. But the chlorine used in most pools can have some negative side effects, not the least of which is reliance on toxic (and finicky) chemicals.

Chlorine's damaging effects on hair are well known, but few people realize that a number of studies have linked inhalation of the chemical by swimmers to increased asthma rates (in fact a new Irish study published this April reported a significant link between the number of years a boy had been swimming and the likelihood of the child being wheezy in the past year.)

A Norwegian study also documented an increased risk of wheezing among children who swim in pools before 6 months of age. Further, in an unpleasant reaction, pee and sweat in water can react with chlorine to form toxic breakdown products known as chloramines.

For health, environmental and aesthetic reasons, a lot of people have expressed interest in alternatives to chlorine pools, and luckily there are more and more options to get wet without smelling like cleaning products.

Managed properly, natural swimming pools have crystal clear water and require no chemicals to maintain, as they are self-cleaning mini-ecosystems. "You can drink the water if you want to, and you don't necessarily have to take a shower," says Morgan Brown of Idaho-based Whole Water Systems, LLC. The natural pools designer says the systems also have lower maintenance costs than conventional pools, and their installation costs are not much more than standard designs.

How Do They Work?
The materials and designs of natural pools can vary widely. Many are lined with rubber or reinforced polyethylene. In most popular models, such as those offered by Kansas-based Total Habitat, the swimming area is separated from a zone planted with aquatic vegetation, which acts as a biological filter. A small waterfall can add ambiance as well as valuable aeration. A skimmer may be used to collect large debris. Total Habitat typically adds a UV sterilizer to assure any germs are killed.

Worried about mosquitoes? Don't be! According to Total Habitat's president Mick Hilleary, natural predators and moving water make a natural swimming pools practically mosquito free. Hilleary says four tires stacked in your backyard will create 100 times more mosquitoes.

Electricity Energy Audit in Malaysia's Electricity Tariff

NATIONAL ENERGY EFFICIENCY AWARENESS CAMPAIGN (SWITCH!)

You can do your own energy audit in a web based application in Calculate Your Bill

It is a very good initiative toward the energy efficiency.

To use it, firstly you have to list all the equipments that consume electricity with the basic specification such as power input, duration of usage, no. of unit.

How to get the data? Every electrical equipment will have the specification label, just search for it, or go to the manufacturer's website.

For some equipment, such as computer, if the data label in the power supply is for full load, but for normal operation, it is only consume half of it, (i.e: Max Power supply : 300W, Normal operation: 150W)

The most electrical consumption equipment normally goes to Air Conditioned Unit, freezer, lightings system etc.

You can also compare saving between Energy Efficiency Equipment and None Energy Efficiency Equipment.

Just try it.

Daylighting as Energy Efficiency Feature

Before the electric light was invented, and for a good while after that too, designing buildings so that daylight could enter interior spaces was a necessity. Yet despite a long history of using daylighting as a design strategy, building owners, architects, engineers and lighting designers are only just beginning to understand how to use it effectively.

But why would a building owner even want to take on the challenge of using daylight to light a building? In a word, money. A good daylighting design can save up to 75 percent of the energy used for electric lighting in a building. The amount of daylight available, the occupancy pattern, and the control strategy can all affect energy savings. In addition, because significant daylight is often available during utility peak demand hours, a good daylighting design can reduce demand charges. Electric lights also generate significant heat in a building and by turning off or dimming the lights when not needed, 10 to 20 percent of the energy used to cool a building can be saved. On top of that, so-called soft savings attributable to increases in productivity and health of the building occupants can add to the hard savings, researchers say.

Roof Glazing for Daylighting
(Skylight)

Using daylight correctly takes a multidisciplinary approach to design and an understanding of the strategies and technologies available to control the sun.

A facility executive’s daylighting goals of holding down first cost and decreasing operating costs often go unmet when the entire building team isn’t brought into the design process from the beginning.

Improper daylighting system will effect the cooling load, heat gain, glare and thermal comfort.

In a typical case, the architect’s design offers plenty of glass for light, but that light brings with it too much heat, forcing the engineer to increase the cooling tonnage when the building is complete. It also becomes difficult to decrease lighting energy costs because when the building is complete, occupants demand blinds to cut down on glare. As a result, the blinds are drawn much of the day, requiring the use of electric lights. An owner who thought daylighting was going to save money finds out that the design not only costs more upfront but costs more to operate as well.

Both the location and interior characteristics of a building are important in daylighting design and should be the first things to consider. Because location varies, as does its effect on the interior design, there can be no cookie-cutter approach to daylighted buildings.

Location has everything to do with access to daylight. An urban building may be shaded during part of the day, which will affect, not rule out, a daylighting strategy.

Multiple stories also have an impact on how deep within the floorplate daylight can travel. There are solutions for multiple-story buildings, such as placing little-used, transitional or unoccupied spaces near the core of building — restrooms, copy rooms or elevators.

Good daylighting design will also affect a building’s interior spatial characteristics. A daylighted building’s interior should have the task areas close to daylight sources — whether that is sidelighting from the windows or top lighting from skylights. The placement of transitional or unoccupied spaces should be moved to the core or other areas with minimal windows.

Although the space is air-conditioned, due to the increased in cooling load, the building management is forced to add more facility to improve the thermal comfort .
(inefficient electricity usage).

The taller and higher the windows, the farther light can reach into the interior. Optimally, the ceiling plane and top of the windows are at the same level. And ceilings higher than 3 meters are important to deeper penetration of light. A rule of thumb, is light penetration is equivalent to 1.2 to 1.5 times the height of the windows, assuming that the ceiling is also that high. In fact, properly designed windows and ceilings could distribute light as far as twice the height of the windows.

That doesn’t necessarily mean a huge expanse of glass. When window-to-wall percentage is less than 35 percent, the usual design includes some combination of solar control glass as view glass at the occupant level with clearer glass as clerestory windows. The clerestory windows become the primary source for distribution of daylight deeper into the space while the view glass offers buffered sidelighting.

To achieve the high perimeter ceiling height for clerestory windows without changing overall floor-to-floor height, ceilings can be sloped, or stepped, away from the windows to allow HVAC ducts to be accommodated in the center of the space.

The biggest challenges in daylighting design are controlling glare and heat. The building owner’s choice of glass for a daylighted building is really a function of geographic location.

Once the design effectively distributes cool daylight around the space, the electric lighting needs to be balanced with available daylight.

Unlike other physical features in a daylighted space, whether it’s structural beams or ductwork that should run perpendicular to the windows, the lighting fixtures should run parallel to the windows. This is so the lights can be zoned — dimmed or turned off in sections according to the intensity and penetration of daylight into
the space during various times of the day.







Save energy with daylighting without compromise the thermal comfort.







To save energy, the electric lighting needs only to augment the daylight. In some case, dimming or turning lights off manually can be an effective method and has worked in a number of buildings where the staff has sufficient introduction into daylighting.

In poor examples of daylighting designs, lighting sensors are poorly located and rarely commissioned. The installation is handed off to contractors who have little understanding about the complexities of a daylighting system. Contractors often merely split the distance between the windows and the farthest wall with little regard as to how daylight is actually distributed.

Good daylighting offers a number of benefits, including energy savings, improved occupant comfort and possibly greater productivity. Creating cool, controlled daylight is a complex design challenge that is only possible with a coordinated group effort by the whole building team.

The energy benefits of a good daylighting system are critical to building owners. To achieve the benefits, building owners have to support a design strategy for their buildings that involves all the design professionals — architects, engineers, designers and contractors — working together from the beginning. That’s the only way to be successful and for the building to be cost-effective.

Energy Efficiency practice in Airport Cafetaria

11pm to 7am

7am to 7pm

7pm to 11am

Please use electricity wisely.

Roof of Malaysian stadium collapses

KUALA TERENGGANU, MALAYSIA - Billed as the pride of the state, the RM300mil Sultan Mizan Zainal Abidin Stadium in Gong Badak suffered a major blow when its roof collapsed on 2 June 2009 - just a year after it was opened.

No one was injured in the 9am incident, but the stadium, which was the venue for Sukma (Malaysian Games) last year, has been declared unsafe.

The damage at the east wing has been estimated at RM25mil.

The stadium is part of the modern Gong Badak sports complex, which was built at an initial cost of RM250mil but the amount surged by an additional RM50mil due to soaring prices of building materials.

The indoor stadium, which is also part of the complex, was built at a cost of RM160mil.

The roof on the stadium's left wing was ravaged after the iron frame structure supporting the 300m-long roof destabilised, causing it to fold. The affected zones were the main entrance, royal podium and the public seating area.