Dining facility HVAC
Dining facility HVAC
(OP)
Is it common practice to provide direct mechanical cooling for a kitchen area in a dining facility? Or, is kitchen worker comfort generally accomplished by air being transfered to the kitchen from the dining area because of the negative pressure in the kitchen?
Would it be a bad idea to provide direct cooling for just the kitchen to ensure 85 or below? What is the best control scheme to accomplish this and avoid system hunt?





RE: Dining facility HVAC
if it is air conditioned I shoot for 80F and 60% during prime time
You can allow air transfer from the dining room system to account for some of the make up air, typically a kitchen make up air unit is 70 or 80% of the hood exhaust
Depending on where you are maybe you use evaporative cooling in the kitchen.
Maybe the short order cook does not have a green card and will not complain if it is 85 and humid in the kitchen.
Take the "V" out of HVAC and you are left with a HAC(k) job.
RE: Dining facility HVAC
Abby,
When you say you would put the kitchen on its own system, you mean that you would provide a make-up air unit for the kitchen that would both heat and cool? The unit would have humidity control, correct? Humidistat mounted where?
I've seen some kitchen MUAHUs designed for a minimum discharge air temp. of 60 - what is your experience with this and does it lead to humidity complaints?
Anyone else have any insight?
RE: Dining facility HVAC
Thus, 400 cfm of dining room temperature air is drawn into the kitchen, not raw outside air.
RE: Dining facility HVAC
I am in a year round cooling environment. I typically would supply un tempered make up air probably 60 to 70% of what the hood exhausts through a back supply plenum.
The kitchen will have its own cooling system and perhaps this system draws in some fresh air as well, and makes up some of the remianing 30% of the exhaust air but not all of it.
The dining room system will have a fair amount of fresh air in it to ventilate for all the people. The fresh air in the dining room system also replaces what is exhausted out of washrooms. Because the kitchen is still running at a slight imbalance, air from the dining room will travel to the kitchen, and this movement of air tends to keep odors in the kitchen and out of the dining room.
You can sometimes have a gas fired unit to temper up the make up air in the winter and perhaps this air is introduced through ceiling diffusers and the kitchen basically heats itself.
Dependeing on where you live perhaps the make up air unit could have an evaporative cooling section on it, or even a DX coil, and then you would be conditioning all the make up air and using it to attempt to keep the kitchewn cool. It is economical if it works, with the evaporative cooler, perhaps it wastes a lot of energy with the DX option.
If it was a small facility, and the hood was say not much more than 6 feet long, sometimes I have used one unit for both the dining area and the kitchen but you do not want to be drawing return air from the kitchen. The make up air volume supplied at the hood is reduced and all the make up air is brought in through the HVAC.
You have no return from the kitchen, the air is exhausted up the hood.
Take the "V" out of HVAC and you are left with a HAC(k) job.
RE: Dining facility HVAC
Read twice and post once.
Take the "V" out of HVAC and you are left with a HAC(k) job.
RE: Dining facility HVAC
Take the "V" out of HVAC and you are left with a HAC(k) job.
RE: Dining facility HVAC
Excellent. Thanks for the response. I have a much better idea about how I will approach this.