Ground temperature impact to the cooling load

xukevin24 · Posts: 20

Hi, there,
When I modeled a 1600 ft2 house in DB, I found ground temperature has significant impact on the peak cooling load calculation as well as cooling energy use. I changed the ground temp from 57 F to 75 F, the peak cooling load doubled because the heat loss from the 4" slab foundation is reduced to half.

I didn't expect that the peak cooling load calculation be that sensitive to the ground temperature, is there any settings that I didn't aware of in DB related with this problem? or the ground heat transfer model in EnergyPlus is simply set up this way that the soil can cool down the room so quickly that we don't need a big AC?

I checked some discussions about this in the forum, but still not quite understand why the ground temperature can has so much impact on the cooling load. Any comments are highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Ke

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