Home Heat Loss Calculation Program
Ralph White, Columbus, /CS
The time when we bought houses because of the unique bay window are as much history now as buying a car because of the stylish fins on the rear fenders. It if is too expensive to drive the car, you can park it and stay at home. But what do you do if it is too expensive to heat your home? Present and future homeowners will have to be at least as concerned about the energy efficiency of their homes as they are their cars.
The program listed with this article performs a heating requirement audit. The aim of the audit is to provide a projected average monthly heat cost for each month of the heating season. The only concern of the audit is fuel consumed by the heating unit; energy for cooking, lighting, and other appliances are not considered.
Before running the program you will need to have at hand some specific information about the house. The total surface area of each exterior wall, the area of each wi ndow and door on each exterior wall, and the amount of insulation in each wall is needed. The program will subtract the window and door area as needed.
Consider, for the purpose of heat-loss, sliding glass doors as windows. Keep the infomation for each exterior wall separately.
Calculate the floor area and note if it is over a basement, crawl space, concrete slab, and any insulation. If parts of the floor fit into different catagories, enter each part separately, the program will combine them appropriately. The ceiling should be treated like the floor. If insulation amounts vary, enter the area of each part separately.
The program computes the rate of BTU loss for a particular house. It allows for user input of the information and data gathered earlier. Using this information, the program generates two tables and a straight line graph. The first table displays the percent of heat loss through walls, doors, floor, ceiling and windows. The second table displays the number of BTU's lost per hour for temperatures ranging from +50 to -30 degrees Farenheit. The graph pictures the information in the second table. The final piece of information given by the program is the rate of BTU loss per hour per degree below 65° F.
This program could be used to determine the feasability of installing additional insulation where it could be most beneficial The program is written in Level II BASIC. The graph is not essential to the program, and may be deleted without loss of information to the user. The program requires 16K of memory.
For more information regarding temperature data, for various cities, obtain the Federal Energy Administration publication, "BUYING SOLAR", (FEA/g-76/154).
Finally, if unpleasantly high fuel costs are projected, remember that beating on the computer has no effect on the results. •
(Please turn page for program /fating)
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