Silestone
Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 2:19 am
Energy recovery devices are more for commercial buildings that have to introduce large amounts of outdoor air into buildings for the proper amount of air exchanges to reduce the amount of Co2 in the air. Most homes don't have devices to introduce outdoor air into the home, if they did an energy recovery device could be used. There are devices in the home that exhaust air from the home such as bathroom fans and range hoods but it is not practical to try to recover the energy lost from these devices. An energy recovery device sometimes known as a hygroscopic recovery unit or enthalpy wheel use a hygroscopic material (a material that can absorb/dispel heat easily) to capture heat from one source of air and transfer it to another source. For example if you were bringing in hot outdoor air into an air conditioner for fresh air to ventilate a building, somewhere you would also be exhausting cool air from the building to maintain proper building pressure. This is a gross waste of energy. With an energy recovery device you would run both air sources through the hygroscopic media in a crossflow pattern and the heat from the incoming outdoor air would be transferred to the the outgoing inside air and the heat would be transferred back outside (or most of the heat) thereby cooling the fresh air coming into the a/c unit.