3 Types of Cooling and Heating Loads You Need to Know About
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You’d be surprised at the importance of properly sizing a new residential HVAC system. If the cooling or heating system is oversized or undersized, it will waste energy and underperform. An essential element of HVAC sizing is calculating cooling and heating loads, or the needs and requirements of a home. There are three main types of loads.
Design Load
This cooling or heating load is directly connected to designated design conditions in your home – in other words, pre-determined summer and winter temperatures considered typical for the sort of load your HVAC system will have to deal with during cold or hot weather. For a certain area and climate, the design temperature might be 84 degrees in the summer and 18 in the winter. Various factors, including your home’s size, layout and energy efficiency, will be considered in determining how much cooling or heating will be needed to bring your home to a designated comfortable temperature during outside design conditions.
Extreme Load
Extreme loads occur during the coldest or hottest days of the year. A skilled HVAC installation technician would never recommend a heating or cooling system based on an extreme load. This would render the system oversized for all other times, resulting the many negative consequences of an oversized HVAC system.
Partial Load
In any home, the partial load is the most common requirement for your cooling or heating system. Even during a cold or hot day, most of the time the temperature is either building up to a peak, or digressing back from that highest or lowest temperature. Similarly, during milder weather, or in the spring or fall, design temperatures will seldom be reached. This means that a standard HVAC system will have too much capacity during the greater part of a day or a year. In recent years, fortunately, HVAC technology has seen advancements in variable-speed and multi-level functioning, meaning systems can adapt their running level to current conditions.
For more information on how cooling and heating loads affect performance and energy efficiency in your Indianapolis area home, contact us atAirtron Heating & Air Conditioning.