Performing calculations
How much cooling power will it be?
How much cooling power do you need to cool a room? According to the rule of thumb it takes 30 watts to cool a cubic meter of room air. That means a room with 35 square meters, times 2 metres 50 for the height of the ceiling, requires the following cooling performance:
According to the rule of thumb, a Trotec PAC 2600 air conditioner is suitable for rooms up to 85 cubic meters, a PAC 3500 for rooms up to 115 cubic meters and a PAC 4400 for rooms up to 145 cubic meters.
The required cooling capacity does, however, also depend on a number of other factors which could increase the “heat load” of the room: the amount of sunshine that streams into a room, the right kind of insulation, the number of people in the room, the number of heating sources (e.g. appliances) etc. All these factors play an important role when deciding which air conditioner is the right one for you.
Lofts:
It is often much more difficult to determine the cooling capacity of lofts correctly, because the people who use them or live there are often unaware how well or poorly insulated their roof is. That’s why, in such cases, we recommend that you add a safety margin of 10 percent to the cooling capacity that you have already determined, especially in old buildings. Our experience has shown that this will normally result in a value between 50 and 60 watts/ m³ of room air. This value can, however, fluctuate considerably depending on the number of skylights and how bad the insulation really is.
Some important information regarding the cooling of whole apartments or flats:
For a start, rooms are not normally 50 m² or bigger. Secondly, you cannot simply take the value that you have determined for your cooling requirement, say 65 m², and simply split it up amongst the rooms.
It’s not as if the air conditioner would not be able to cool the rooms as far the capacity is concerned, but this would only be possible if the air were circulated continuously.
Simply put: the cold air which the air conditioner produces is far heavier than the warm air in the room. This means that the cool air cannot reach all the places in a flat or an apartment, only the places that the fan can reach.
An air conditioner cannot provide the same even circulation throughout all the adjoining rooms. There will be a cooling effect in the adjoining room if the stream of cool air from air conditioner reaches that particular room, but the rooms beyond will only cool down minimally.
That’s why it is important for the air conditioner to have a powerful radial fan with an adjustable air guide. In contrast to axle fans, radial fans have the advantage that they can transport the cool air with greater momentum and therefore much further than conventional fans.
This is one of the reasons why the models in the PAC series are equipped with extremely powerful radial fans. The infinitely variable air guides can be directed upwards and the cool air is then transported much, much further – even into the adjoining rooms.