Replacing your commercial HVAC system isn’t always a straightforward process. To help you receive the maximum performance from your new system, your installation team will need to calculate your business location’s HVAC load precisely. Here is what business owners in Dover, DE, need to know about commercial HVAC loads.
What Is an HVAC Load?
Put simply, an area’s HVAC load represents the exact amount of heat energy necessary to either heat or cool that area. We express HVAC load in terms of BTUs, or British Thermal Units. One BTU is the amount of heat necessary to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. When we talk about heating, the HVAC load will be the amount of heat we need to warm an area. Similarly, when we talk about cooling, the HVAC load will be the amount of heat we must remove to cool it.
How to Calculate It
To find out the HVAC load of a given room or building, HVAC installers must perform a Manual J load calculation. To do this, they must gather important information like the size and indoor area of the building in which they plan to install the new commercial HVAC system. They also need to find out the local humidity and temperature that prevail throughout the year. Finally, they will need to know the amount of insulation in the building’s floors, walls and ceilings. They will also consider how often the area will need heating or cooling and how much of each it will need.
To obtain accurate results, the installation team will consider each object in your commercial building, including every piece of furniture and the number of occupants to expect, and try to find its likely BTU value. Adding these together will give a total value for the whole building. They may also consider factors like whether the building faces the sun or not.
Once the installation team has the necessary data, the next step will be to plug everything into a special mathematical formula. The result will be your business location’s total HVAC load.
Why It Matters
Why is all of this elaborate preparation necessary? The short answer is that figuring the HVAC load incorrectly, even if only by a small margin, can have rather dire consequences for you. This is why you shouldn’t deal with contractors who either completely refuse to perform a Manual J load calculation or only do so by giving a rough estimate.
If your HVAC installation team overestimates your business location’s HVAC load, for example, your new commercial HVAC system will be too powerful. As a result, your HVAC system may turn off before it can truly complete a heating or cooling cycle.
When your system turns on and off in this way, we call that short cycling. It’s a behavior that can wear your system down, diminish its efficiency, and potentially curtail its lifespan.
On the contrary, if your installers underestimate your location’s HVAC load, your commercial HVAC system will be too weak. Consequently, your system will run longer than it properly should. This will also overstress the system and reduce its service life.
In either case, mistakes in calculating HVAC load will pointlessly raise your business expenses, and these expenses can add up over time. They will appear primarily in the form of higher energy bills, but having an overburdened HVAC system means that you’ll have to potentially pay to repair it more often. If your system ends up breaking down sooner, you’ll spend more money to replace your system sooner than you would have otherwise needed to.
Paying insufficient attention to your commercial HVAC load can cost you a great deal in the long run. To help save money on energy usage, keep your clients comfortable, and help your business prosper, you need professionals who can do this all-important work efficiently. Call Griffith Energy Services today and request our quality, expert HVAC installation services for your business in Dover, DE.
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