ORIGINAL: finch13

The ammonia refrigeration system is driven by 3 compressors so it does get a fair bit of help on the chemistry side of things. The warehouse is roughly 150,000 sq. ft., completely refirigereated from 40 deg. down to -10 deg.

ORIGINAL: KevinAccord

From pics to A/C in a few hours!!!!! Anyways... it sound cool what you do Falk, U get paid well? hope so! sound like tons of hard work. I need an a/c for my appartment. it's like 50ft by 65ft. How many ton's will I need?

Wow! A ton of cooling, that must be a lot. Well, it is...it's 12,000 Btu's (British thermal units) per hour of heat being moved out of the space being cooled. Most residential air conditioning systems are in the range of 1 to 5 tons. But where did the term come from? Early refrigeration came about due to the desire to make ice, spawned primarily by the brewing industry (cheers). Prior to mechanical refrigeration, the only way to produce cool temperatures was by removing heat with melting ice. As ice melts, it absorbs a "heat of fusion", an amount equal to 144Btu/lb. Thus, a TON of ice, melting in one day would absorb 288,000 Btu's of heat or 12,000 Btu's every hour for 24 hours. A ton of ice is a cube a little over 3' on each side. Imagine your 3 ton system on your house replaced by a column of ice 3'x3'x9'tall being melted each day. Of course, this is not quite true since your 3-ton system only runs at full capacity a fraction of the day but it's an interesting visualization. Early refrigeration systems were sized in comparison to the equivalent amount of ice needed prior to their advent; ice which was harvested from rivers in winter and stored in large ice houses for use during the summer months.