3 Kinds of Heating and Cooling Loads You Should Know About

When a cooling or heating system is sized correctly for your home, it will save more energy and perform better than a system that’s too large or too small. Figuring out the heating and cooling loads for your home is an essential aspect when picking central air conditioners, heat pumps and furnaces. Here’s an explanation of three types of heating and cooling loads.

Design Load

This is the heating and cooling requirement for a home to be comfortable under designated outside design conditions in the winter and summer. In a typical cold-winter/hot-summer area, that might be 20 degrees in the winter and 84 degrees in the summer. The calculation considers a variety of factors including the size, layout and energy efficiency of the home.

Extreme Load

During the hottest and coldest days of the year, a home will experience extreme loads. This does not mean your HVAC system should be engineered to satisfy extreme loads. If that were the case, your cooling or heating system would be oversized during the vast majority of the year. This can result in several negative issues, including wasted energy, reduced comfort and more stress on system components.

Partial Load

In reality, homes experience partial loads a great majority of the time. Even during the midst of summer or winter, most of any given day is progressing toward the highest/lowest temperature for that day, and then moving away from it. The same applies during the bridge seasons of fall and spring when design temperatures/loads seldom are reached. Because of this, properly sized standard HVAC systems are still going to be oversized most of the time. The good news is that in recent years, cooling and heating systems are equipped with variable-speed or multi-stage components that will adapt the equipment’s running speed and level to current conditions.

At Sobieski Services, Inc., our goal is to help our customers in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey learn more about energy and home comfort issues – especially HVAC and plumbing – so they can save money and live in healthier, more comfortable homes.

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