Urban air conditioning systems
Introduction
Centralized heating is an air conditioning installation that serves several premises, whether or not they are in a home. When the premises or rooms have a single consumption unit (a home, for example), it is called individual heating; If they belong to several consumer units (homes or offices) it is called collective heating.
When the central heating system serves several buildings, whether residential or other uses, such as a neighborhood or a town, it is called urban, neighborhood or district heating.
The main advantages are greater efficiency and that neighbors do not have to worry about the maintenance of the generators. Also, in many cases, large consumers have better prices for the energy used, which produces economic savings that can be important (for example, in Spain, natural gas has a price per unit of energy that is 20...30% lower for building central heating than for individual ones). In current systems the efficiency is greater than in individual systems:.
• - Larger boilers are more efficient than small ones.
• - You can afford a more efficient heating system, since performance grows with the size of the installation.
• - Distributed consumption causes fewer stops and starts.
• - Due to the lower number of stops and starts the system has greater efficiency than an individual system.
• - A modular system can be used, which starts modules when their power is not enough. Several modules at full power are more efficient than many individual boilers at half power.
• - The use is more intensive and the investment is amortized sooner.
Although in some old systems there was no automatic regulation and some neighbors could be hot, while others were cold, now there are much more perfect regulation systems and, in addition, it is mandatory that there be individual accounting for consumption, which favors a better distribution of heat in the different consumption units.
The most common centralized heating system is the hot water system that uses a boiler where the water is heated and emitters of the radiator or underfloor type in the inhabited premises, carrying the hot water through a network of pipes. It can also be hot air heating. The general distribution, in the case of urban or neighborhood heating, can be by steam.[1].
Taking advantage of the heat plant, the production of domestic hot water is jointly installed, which will also operate with much higher efficiency than the individual systems. To from the central tank to the tap where it will be used, a return circuit is used in which the heated water is recirculated so that there is always water at the appropriate temperature near the entrance of each consumer. Thus, the water only has to come from the general distributor (normally a vertical column) to each private home.