By, Jared Horn
Instead of just showing you the highlights of the installation of the GSHP system we are installing for our new facility, we decided to take things a step further and turn this into what we are calling a Project Highlight. As the project progresses we will go through and provide you with the full details of the decisions we have made with regard to the project and the reasoning for those decisions. Our hope is that this will shed some light on the areas of design that newer designers are a little uncomfortable with and maybe remind some of the more experienced designers about a nuance or two.
The first installment of the Project Highlight is an introduction to the project with the construction properties of the facility as well as the resulting building load calculations. The 127.5’x60’ slab-on-grade style facility has 90’ of the total length with 20’ side walls with a 24’ peak and 37.5’ of building length with 12’ side walls and a 16’ peak. Other construction details are as follows:
- Metal sheathed walls with 2” x 6” framing and R-19 batt. insulation
- A metal sloped roof/ceiling over a wood frame with R-38 batt. Insulation
- Slab-on-grade floor, heavy dry soil, 2” foam edge insulation 3’ down, tile floor
- Low-e windows with a U-value of 0.410
- Doors will be metal with a fiberglass core
- Occupancy levels of 10 people and 2 appliances
Our home offices are located in Elkton, SD. Elkton is a small town roughly one mile West of the South Dakota-Minnesota state line, and 15 miles East of Brookings, SD. The weather location we chose to calculate the building loads is Brookings, SD. The 99% heating design percentage for Brookings, SD is -11°F, while the 1% cooling design temperature is 85°F. These are the temperature points that the peak heating and cooling loads are based on.
Now that all of the construction details are given, we can determine the peak building loads in heating and cooling using the ACCA manual-J load calculation procedure. The peak loads were determined to be 124,081 Btu/hr and 42,309 respectively.