What is a good heat loas calc program?

gregsr74

I am looking for a nice and easy heat load program that is windows based. Any help would greatly be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Alan(CaliforniaRadiant)Forbes

Slant/Fin

Hydronic Explorer........and it's free


http://www.slantfin.com/hydronic/index.html



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Ken D.

Heat Load

Carrier has a nice one in REZCALC. It is not free, but well worth it if you are doing heat loads regularly. Easy to use and good tech support.

Luke Lefever

I like WrightJ from WrightSoft. Kinda' pricy but very easy to use and you can make templates that already include all the design conditions and your company name, address, etc. The pie-charts are great to show customers where the energy goes. Luke

Constantin

I've liked HVAC-Calc

As a mere homeowner, I found HVAC-Calc to be among the best written software for what it is, a program written for the air-side of the business. You can read a review I submitted for this website or a somewhat updated one you can find on mine. I liked HVAC-Calc sufficiently to buy the permanent license.

So far, I found the Hydronics Explorer (HE) package neither as intuitive as HVAC-Calc nor as comprehensive. There are far fewer wall insulation/construction choices in HE, for example. The same goes for Siggy's Hydronics Design Studio. On the other hand, HE is free and HDS does WAY more than just heat loss calculations.

From what I can tell, the folks who can afford the really comprehensive packages (like Wrightsoft's or Elitesoft's suites), really love them. Having worked with neither, the only advice I can give is to try as many as you can and find a program that thinks like you. Only then will you realize the time savings and assistance these programs are meant to provide.

Unknown

whelp

both air-focused and baseboard-focused heatloss calculators will probably overstate your actual heatloss need for radiant. I know it doesn't make intuitive sense, but I believe they typically build in fudge factors for their heat systems that don't apply to radiant.