I have a customer who is building a geodesic dome in central Florida. I normally use HVAC Calc to work out the loads, but I'm finding it very hard to get useful results on this dome. Anyone have any experience in this? Greewing
I used Wrightsoft and made tons of custom walls and other structures when I had to bid a dome house. Luckily I did not get the project as the customer was slightly nuts. Where are you having trouble? If you give me a specific part of it that isn't working out for you, I might be able to guide you through a work around.
Loads frequently require us to find the area of triangles and circles, you can assign value with what you know...insulation, floor space etc.
Down here in Florida, walls make almost no difference as to loads so long as they are insulated to R10 or better. We only heat through about 40 degrees and cool through 20. That means that the difference in wall area between a box (easy to load) and a sphere (not easily dimensioned in Man J software) is trivial relative to two 800 pound load gorillas - glass and infiltration. So I would model the sphere as a set of boxes, but excercise particular catuion as to glass exposure direction, shading and fenestration coefficients. Model the roof / ceiling as approximately equal to floor area and it should be close enough. We all know that it makes little difference what goes on in a load calc past the first decimal place since two stage systems are available only in whole ton increments. Slightly oversize the ductwork and provide manual dampers to sort out any room comfort / airflow discrepancies and call it good.
