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1973 the year of the first serious energy crises.
Teddy Rosenthal and I had worked together for a few years, trying to get the Swedish Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) community to calculate energy needs and system dimensioning with help of our computer programs. Teddy had worked hard on translating the university program BRIS to Fortran, with some support from Engelbrekt Isfelt and me. We preached about the senseless over-dimensioning in HVAC systems and the necessity to do energy simulations. The number of energy saving experts in Sweden was around 20 and we were a community of friends who often worked together.
The crises came out of the blue and the Swedish politicians who normally lived in one-family wooden houses with fairly good insulation decided to introduce emergency measures. It was issued a decree to keep 18 centigrade in the dwellings during night and that all owners of apartment housing should adjust the equipment to fulfill this. This was supported by the 200 new energy saving experts that showed up in a couple of month and who received funding grants from the government. Most of them living in one-family, well insulated wooden houses. One-family houses could of course not be controlled and therefore it was imposed on owners of apartment houses and recommended to owners of one-family houses.
Sweden have unfortunately a majority of its people living in apartment houses. The building boom in construction during the 50's and 60's was apartment buildings in concrete material, often with sloppy insulation and always with grossly over-dimensioned heating systems. This majority had a very difficult winter, freezing enormously, but with 18 centigrade in the dwellings during the night. Something that the politicians and the new experts could not understand. They never heard about mass inertia, surface temperatures etc.. Since it was a majority and the politicians are sensitive to that, it was later a much more positive attitude to research and investigations.
To be able to follow the decree, the owners of the apartment houses had to lower the temperature on the hot water that supplied the radiators. Since the over-dimensioning of the piping system, made it almost impossible to have an even distribution, already there was a major problem. Before the crises the coldest apartment had around 22 centigrade and the warmest had to sleep with open windows. You can imaging what the result was.
To add to this, the common radiators was over-dimensioned and of the radiator/convector type. This radiators are designed to produce a lot of warm air. The lower temperature that was necessary to produce 18 centigrade air temperature, could not maintain a surface temperature on the radiator, high enough to compensate for the low surface temperatures on windows and concrete walls.
On top of this, the lowering of temperature was set between 8 pm in the evening and 6 am in the morning. Anyone who had the opportunity to run an energy simulation on a heavy concrete building, knows the result. The lowest perceived temperature will be between 7 am and 9 am, exactly the time when normal people have to get out of bed, shower, dress, have breakfast and go to work.
It was a real mess and it is still living as a memory with the Swedish population. The good thing is that they today have engineers who understands the parameters of comfort and energy efficiency. Sweden also have Building Codes that includes surface temperatures, allows for gliding air temperatures and considers mass inertia. What was a crazy and ignorant political decision without considerations to comfort criteria, turned out to be a blessing for the country. It also initiated and gave a lot of people learning experiences.
During the crisis it was also other measurements introduced by the politicians and the new energy experts. This is only a couple of the interesting blips, but enjoy them,
- Every second street lamp was disconnected. By this, half of the consumption for street lightning was saved. A minor problem was the function of the human eye, which refused to adopt to the energy saving measure. The human eye have a slowness and will not react fast on going from brightness to darkness. Unfortunatly as a bi-product of the energy saving, it was a significant rise in the accident rate. It would probably been better to totally close the lights during during the second half the night and the question is if it anyway had any effects, since this were off peak.
- A gasoline rationing was introduced, but nearly nobody got effected and many people still have a lot of cupons left. It was something wrong in the allocation and calculation system.
- Different kind of Building Codes were introduced, that did not make sense. Somebody that manufactured equipment for measuring of hot water consumption, managed to get a rule, which if practised meant that nearly every bathroom would need an expensive measurement system for the hot water consumption. It would be an even higher cost to collect the data from the meters. We think that this rule no longer exist in the Building Code.
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