Building load programs - potential tool for efficient design

A number of building load calculation programs portray unsteady state heat loss/gain models for the building and their usage as influenced by the annual weather cycle. These hourly outputs are indeed massive, making them less valuable than they should be for the designer. This paper presents the method of organizing the output reports by extracting five possible critical loads for each zone and the building as a whole from the voluminous outputs for the heating and the cooling periods. An examination of such condensed reports containing the critical loads and their representation on a computer generated psychrometric charts will permit at a glance, the identification of the zones with peculiar load problems and potentials for redesign. The diversity factor between the building load and the sum of the zonal maximums is other useful information generated in the process.