A 150,000 sq ft industrial manufacturing plant where process heat from curing ovens becomes a genuine line item in the cooling load calculation, makeup air keeps a paint booth and weld fume collection system from depressurizing the building, and one precision CNC room needs its own independent cooling system entirely separate from the rest of the plant.
The project brief: a weld bay, paint/finishing line, enclosed CNC machining room, and general assembly area serving roughly 220 production and office staff. The defining engineering difference from an office building or school is that a meaningful share of the cooling load here doesn't come from people, lighting, or the sun — it comes from the manufacturing process itself, and a load calculation that ignores that would significantly undersize the plant's cooling system.
This module walks the whole project end to end: a full worked cooling load calculation that adds curing-oven process heat to the usual envelope/people/lighting inputs, why two 125 hp air compressors are deliberately ducted to reject heat outdoors instead of into the load calculation, makeup air sizing for the paint booth and weld fume systems under NFPA 33, and why the CNC room gets its own dedicated 5-ton split system. The full worked numbers and complete bill of materials are part of the unlocked module below.