The program's residential baseline — a single-zone, single-system house that establishes Manual J load calculation, Manual S equipment selection, and Manual D duct design against the exact method every later project in this program either scales up or deviates from.
The project brief: a 2,500 sq ft single-story home in Charlotte, NC (climate zone 4A, mixed-humid), conditioned by a single variable-speed air-source heat pump with electric backup heat, ducted through an unconditioned attic. This module walks a full Manual J envelope-and-infiltration heat loss calculation using the UA method, the design cooling load and Manual S equipment selection window, a worked heat pump balance-point and backup-heat sizing calculation, and Manual D duct design from available static pressure through friction rate to branch sizing.
It closes by naming, explicitly, why residential HVAC design is a structurally different problem from commercial design — single-zone control with no building automation system and no load-diversity calculation to perform — setting up the contrast the apartment building and office building projects build on next. The full worked numbers, bill of materials, and design reasoning are part of the unlocked module below.