Restaurant BTU Calculator V2 — Sq Ft + Equipment + Occupancy
A real cooling-load formula for Birmingham restaurants. Square footage plus equipment heat plus occupancy plus solar gain. Worksheet plus example calculations.
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Who It's For
Restaurant owners, operators, and facility managers sizing or resizing HVAC for any restaurant in the Birmingham metro.
What's Inside
The 4-input formula, equipment-heat reference table (commercial kitchen equipment by BTU output), occupancy load math, Birmingham solar gain factors, two worked examples, and the 5-question sanity check.
Why It Matters
Most HVAC problems in Birmingham are preventable or fixable cheaply if you know what to look for. This guide tells you what.
The first version of this BTU calculator covered basic square footage. V2 fixes what was missing. Restaurant cooling load is square footage plus kitchen equipment heat plus people plus solar gain on the windows. Miss one and the AC fails on a hot day. This worksheet puts all four in one place. Use it before you sign any HVAC quote.
This is the field-guide version -- the same approach a 25-year HVAC tech takes walking into a service call. No marketing fluff. No upsells dressed up as "tips." Just the working tech's playbook, written down.
A look inside
Why restaurant cooling is harder than office cooling
A restaurant's cooling load per square foot is 3-5x an office's. Commercial cooking equipment dumps massive radiant and convective heat. People dining add heat through metabolism. Big front-of-house windows let in solar. Air infiltration from constantly-opening front doors. Get any of it wrong and you have a hot dining room at peak service. This formula handles all of it.
The V2 formula
Total cooling load (BTU/hr) = base sq ft load + equipment heat + occupancy load + solar gain
- Base sq ft load: kitchen sq ft × 70 BTU + dining sq ft × 50 BTU
- Equipment heat: sum from kitchen equipment table
- Occupancy load: max occupancy × 400 BTU per person at dining + kitchen staff × 600 BTU per person
- Solar gain: south/west windows sq ft × 80 BTU; east windows × 60 BTU; north windows × 30 BTU
- ...
Equipment heat reference (BTU/hr output)
Approximate sensible heat output for typical commercial kitchen equipment:
- 6-burner gas range — 13,000 BTU/hr
- 12" gas griddle — 10,000 BTU/hr
- 24" gas charbroiler — 18,000 BTU/hr
- 36" gas charbroiler — 26,000 BTU/hr
- ...
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