October 09, 2005
AFT Presents at the Pacific Coast Electrical Association Conference
AFT's Trey Walters was invited to speak at the 2005 Pacific Coast Electrical Association in Hawaii. He made a co-presentation on "Improving Energy Efficiency In Pumping Systems - Making Sound Business & Technical Decision."
In Hawaii the primary pump usage is for building systems such as HVAC chilled water systems. With energy costs of 20-30 cents per kW-hour in Hawaii, there is a strong interest in finding ways to reduce energy usage, and Trey had many discussions with interested engineers.
The cost of purchasing and building pumping systems often pales in comparison to the cost of operating them, with energy being one of the major or the major operating cost component. Designing systems for life cycle cost instead of first cost not only makes good business sense, but also responds to the increasing need for energy conservation.
Ongoing development of AFT software continues to enhance engineer's ability to design for life cycle cost, such as AFT Fathom's built-in energy cost calculator that will calculate pump energy costs for constant or varying energy rates over specified time periods and do present value calculations of those costs.
What People Are Saying
Here at AFT we understand the importance of the work engineers are accomplishing with our software and our attention and responsiveness to technical support matters reflects that. Sometimes these are complicated modeling questions while at other times they are simple requests for help that need an answer right now!
An example of the latter was a late Friday evening software reinstall at Black & Veatch onto a new server (pitty the poor IT folks who often have to do this work while the rest of us are at home relaxing). Fearing we wouldn't be able to assist them at such a late hour, they contacted us with a last minute request for assistance. We think Regina Gaines, Software Distribution Lead, said it all when it comes to AFT's responsiveness when she emailed afterwards; "You guys are a life saver! Thank you!!"
You're welcome, Regina.
Tip of the Month - Morphing Junctions
No, this isn't something out of Kafka novel. If you hold down the CTRL key while you drag a junction onto the Workspace and drop onto an existing Workspace junction, the old junction will 'morph' (change) into the new one. Pipes will be connected to the new junction and related data will be copied into the new junction.
This not only speeds up the process of changing a junction from one type to another, but helps to prevent parameters that are to remain the same aren't missed by manual data entry, such as elevation, since they are automatically copied to the new junction.
Note that junctions cannot be morphed if the current scenario has child scenarios and junctions morphed in a child scenario do not affect the parent scenarios.