Restaurant Cooling: BTU Calculator for Birmingham
A real BTU sizing framework for restaurant kitchens, dining rooms, and combined spaces — built for Birmingham's humidity and a working line.
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Who It's For
Restaurant owners, GMs, and consultants planning new builds, replacements, or addressing kitchens that never cool down.
What's Inside
Equipment heat-load chart (every common piece), occupancy load math, ventilation load for Birmingham humidity, makeup-air implications, the dining-room vs kitchen split, and the question to ask before you sign any RTU spec.
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 to look for.
Restaurant cooling load is brutal. A 1,500-sq-ft kitchen with a flat-top, fryer, and steam table generates 80,000-120,000 BTU/hour by itself before you cool the dining room or fight the door opening every 90 seconds. Most contractors size like it's a residence. They're wrong. This guide gives you the real numbers.
This is the field-guide version — the same approach we take when we walk 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 Sizing Defeats Residential Logic
Residential load is dominated by walls, windows, and people. Restaurant load is dominated by EQUIPMENT — and equipment can throw 5-10x the heat per square foot of a typical office. Add the door cycling 200-400 times during service and the dining room HVAC is fighting both kitchen heat migration AND humidity from outside air. Standard Manual J residential sizing gets a restaurant about half-right.
Step 1 — Equipment Heat Gain
Sum the sensible and latent heat from each piece of cooking equipment. Use manufacturer specs when available; rule-of-thumb when not. Hooded equipment dumps about 50% of heat to the hood and 50% to the room; un-hooded dumps 100%.
- Gas range, 6-burner (hooded): ~12,000 BTU/hr to room
- Flat-top griddle, 36": ~15,000 BTU/hr
- Gas char-broiler, 36": ~22,000 BTU/hr
- Deep fryer, 50-lb capacity: ~12,000 BTU/hr
- …
Step 2 — Occupancy Load
People doing different work give different load:
- Line cook on full service: 700-900 BTU/hr per person
- Server walking: 500 BTU/hr per person
- Customer at table (sedentary, eating): 400 BTU/hr per person
- Bartender: 600 BTU/hr
- …
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