Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know: dog paws can manipulate calculator keys. Not the new calculators that everybody uses on their smart phones today, mind you, but the old fashioned calculators with thick keys you often saw in banks twenty years ago. I asked the staff here if I could have a calculator, and they managed to score one from a garage sale. It’s a Victor 600 series from the 1950s—it’s cool as a classic fin car! Now I can practice my math whiz skills only a short ways away from my favorite couch.
But Olive, you aren’t the company accountant! Why do you need to do math?
Good question. And I’ve got a good answer: doing the math is how we perform heat load calculations here at MK Russell & Abbott. And heat load calculations are the secret to getting a great new heating system.
Why Heat Load Calculations are Super-Duper Important
Houses aren’t all built the same. That means they don’t have the same heating requirements. And heating requirements are about more than the size and construction of a house. They’re also about the appliances, the windows and the direction they’re facing, the amount of people who live there, and the number of light fixtures.
To find out the “heat load” of a home—i.e. how many heating tonnes a system must generate to create comfort without also creating energy waste—requires our experts to do an extended walkthrough of your home and take account of all the factors I mentioned above. Once our team has done that, they put all the data through a complex calculation. (Don’t worry, they use the modern computer calculators.) The math doesn’t lie: at the end, they’ll know exactly the heating tons necessary for your ideal comfort and energy savings.
You never want a heating load calculation that’s done on a “guesstimate.” That can lead to disasters like a heater that can’t warm up the space, or one that’s so powerful it keeps shutting off early and draining power as it rapidly turns on and off.
So when you’re looking for a great new heating system for your home, trust to the people who take the time to do a thorough heat load calculation! Our HVAC professionals didn’t learn math just to add up baseball batting averages, you know! (Okay, some did—but they can put it to other uses!)
Stay warm,
Olive