Apr 23, 2024

The trade association, Eurovent, has released an Industry Recommendation that provides a methodology to calculate life cycle energy consumption and costs of air handling units. It aims to support the environmental impact assessment of air handling units.

The ‘Eurovent Recommendation 6/19: Life cycle cost calculation for AHUs’ defines a standardised methodology for calculating the energy demand and the resulting life cycle costs (LCC) of air handling units to estimate the total costs of ownership of the unit over its lifetime. Since the energy demand of an air handling unit normally has a major impact on the overall environmental impact, this publication can be seen as a very important step forward to ensure harmonised procedures to assess the product environmental footprint of air handling units. The calculation rules defined in Eurovent 6/19 are based on scientific basics and available standards, where available, related to the performance of components in air handling units including their characteristics in part load operation.

Martin Lenz, Chairperson of PG-AHU, stated: “We are convinced that this new Recommendation has significant importance to achieve a harmonised European procedure for air handling unit life cycle assessment. Furthermore, the methodology allows selecting the perfectly fitting air handling unit for each application based on environmental and economic aspects (total costs of ownership). It makes me proud that we were able to develop this very helpful method and recommendation with so many European experts from the Eurovent network. Special thanks to all the contributors.”

This document was published by Eurovent and developed in a joint effort by participants of the Special Project ‘Air Handling Units 2030’ (SP-AHU1). The document can be downloaded free of charge in the Eurovent Document Library on the Eurovent association's website.