What are Heat Load Calculations?
Mechanical Designer Natalie MacDonald explains heat load calculations in about 90 seconds.
www.dewberry.com
Hi everyone. My name's Natalie MacDonald and I am a mechanical designer in the Raleigh, North Carolina, office. Today I'm going to talk about heat load calculations, which are used to determine the cooling capacity of a building. At the start of calculating heat loads, the designer or the engineer will use various pieces of information about each room and space within the building, include the room square footage, the wall and window heights and dimensions, the floor-to-floor heights, and internal heat gain sources, such as computers or other miscellaneous equipment, as well as the amount of people and how much heat they give off in whatever kind of activity that they're doing in the space. With the help of a computer model, then we use all of this information to determine the peak load that each space will experience at whatever point during the year. These are then used in conjunction with other code requirements, such as pressurization and ventilation requirements, to determine the volume of air that needs to serve each space, usually measured in cubic feet per minute, or CFM, and the temperature at which it needs to be at serving each space. The peak values are then also used to size the cooling equipment that is serving a group of spaces, such as an air handler or the cooling equipment serving the entire building, such as a chiller. Keep in mind though that diversity is almost always taken into account when calculating cooling equipment sizes, because the peak load for each room is almost never experienced at the exact same hour of the year.