RP-1742 — Update to Measurements of Office Equipment Heat Gain Data

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ASHRAE RP 1742 provides up-to-date heat gain date from various office equipment to be used for load calculation purposes. Heat gain, diversity factor, and load factor data obtained from this project have replaced the outdated data from previous ASHRAE literature and are now available in the Nonresidential Cooling and Heating Load Calculations Chapter of the 2017 ASHRAE Fundamentals handbook.

Experimental sites were selected to cover wide range of job profiles, allowing to obtain the representative heat gain data for various office equipment. It was found that the equipment heat gain was a function of both the equipment specification (e.g. processing power or employed graphics card for computers) and the job profile.

New types of equipment, including laptop docking stations, tablet PCs, and up to date LCD screens were included in the measurements and data analysis to obtain heat gains. From the test data, it was found that updated heat gain values in comparison to the old handbook (2013) values were lower for some equipment while they were higher for other equipment. While the power management capabilities of most of the equipment have increased over time, desktop and mobile computers have increased processing capabilities as well. The net effect is an increase in peak power consumption in comparison to 2013 ASHRAE Fundamentals handbook’s tables.