- A BTU, or British Thermal Unit, is the traditional unit for heat or heat removal
- A ton of refrigerant is 12,000 BTUs.
- One watt of energy is equal to 3.412 BTUs
Unfortunately…. you need to cool all of the energy, even the energy emitted as light. This is because the emitted photons will end up heating up the surfaces they hit. The heat/light ratio does impact your HVAC design but a good estimate is that you need to cool every watt of lighting.
Let’s assume you need to cool 10,000 watts. You will need about 2.85 tons of refrigerant
- 10,000 watts x 3.142 BTUs per watt = 34,120 BTUs
- 34,120 BTUs / 12,000 BTUs per ton = 2.85 tons
- kW/ton = 12/EER
In our example of 10,000 watts of light, an HVAC system would consume about 2,850 watts of energy to cool the room. This is very close to our rule of thumb of 3,000 watts.
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