PowerShades president Ryan Chacon explains to Green Builder Media's Sara Gutterman how cloud-scheduled automated window shades manage solar heat gain and daylight, cutting HVAC energy use by as much as 30 percent. He also describes the company's low-draw power-over-Ethernet shades, installed at the net zero Hotel Marcel in Connecticut and at the Mariposa Meadows demonstration project.
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Sara Gutterman: Hi. I'm here today with Brian, president of Power Shades. Tell me why people should be paying attention to shades as a part of their overall energy strategy.
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Ryan Chacon: So historically, lighting was a large contributor of heat and energy losses that were very inefficient. But with the advent of modern LED lighting, that's no longer the case. Another large contributor is your HVAC cost. It burns lots of electricity, and by using window treatments, you can conserve as much as 30% of that energy usage by blocking the heat energy from large window surfaces.
00:00:43:28 - 00:00:54:10
Ryan Chacon: But you could also use that same window surface as heat gain in the winter months, so you can offset a significant amount of that cost via the shades.
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Sara Gutterman: Talk about the automated benefits of your solutions and how they enhance efficiency with respect to things like minimizing solar gain and enhancing daylighting.
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Ryan Chacon: We have a integrated cloud based system. During the initial order process, we capture some data points, such as their zip code, to know geographically where they're located. And that tells us the position of the sun throughout the year. We also capture window facing direction. Using these attributes, it makes it very easy to automate, say, the west facing windows for the afternoon hours.
00:01:29:15 - 00:01:50:23
Ryan Chacon: And we can set schedules that aren't just based on time itself, but more position of the sun. We can set a schedule that will adjust the shades to whatever you prefer, and it will automatically adjust that time of day based on, you know, summer and winter months. And that's comes with the shades as part of the built in automation.
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Ryan Chacon: But they also play very nicely with all your major players of third party integrations.
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Sara Gutterman: Have a little bit about the cost benefit analysis of power shades.
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Ryan Chacon: The main critical area of savings would be your your heating and cooling cost. It can be as much as 30% of HVAC cost by utilizing window treatments. Also lighting NBC. So obviously in the daytime take advantage of natural light as much as possible.
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Sara Gutterman: You have any special insulating lines or fabrics.
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Ryan Chacon: We push our fabric suppliers to have better energy coefficients, and we do have some proprietary in-house calculators to give us those numbers of which fabrics give the best performance.
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Sara Gutterman: We have power shades at one of our demonstration projects, Mariposa meadows, and they really do blend high design and beauty with performance. So let's stay on the topic of your fabrics for a moment, because you do have to blend design performance. So how much science goes into developing the fabrics?
00:02:54:23 - 00:03:22:13
Ryan Chacon: We have a lab where we go and test certain fabrics, often specific to particular projects, but surprisingly, there's not. The fabric suppliers I feel aren't doing as good a job as they could be in that area. And we as a company, we're constantly pushing these suppliers to, to to provide more data. But I think that's something that the whole industry needs to demand in order to improve.
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Sara Gutterman: Tell me about your power over Ethernet or Poe products.
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Ryan Chacon: Sure. So we have we were the first to come out with a Poey Howard shade, and our Poe product is unique in the fact that the max power that it will draw on any load. So any size shade is five watts, and that's just a store of the initial energy. Typically it's in the middle of watts as far as the energy consumption.
00:03:52:20 - 00:04:24:05
Ryan Chacon: And the advantage of that is, is when it's needed to pull the, you know, to open or close the shade. The energy is stored over time in the shade itself. So thus you don't have these power factor corrections necessary when driving the shade. And because of that, our shades were used in the very first fully net zero hotel in Connecticut called Hotel Marcel, a large project that we install hundreds of shades in.
00:04:24:05 - 00:04:47:26
Ryan Chacon: And they were specifically chosen because of the very low energy consumption and also because they're very easy to automate. I don't know if you're familiar with the technology, but the advantage is, is it's a low voltage single cable that handles both power and the communication necessary for automation. So it makes for a very efficient from a wiring perspective.
00:04:47:28 - 00:05:03:14
Ryan Chacon: And then because of the way we store energy over time, there's no surge in power once opening or closing. So if you do an entire building all at once, the power grid would not see any rise at all in power consumption.
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Sara Gutterman: Anything else you'd like to add?
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Ryan Chacon: We've we've enjoyed the project that we've worked on with you guys, and we're we're excited to see it through completion. We're very happy that folks like yourself are taking a green initiative. More people should. It is important and we're very happy to participate.