I am currently sitting in a really boring meeting that is being held in a very small room. The room is packed full of people and it is hot in here. This situation reminds me of a conversation I had with an HVAC engineer years ago about the heat load that people present to a cooling system. During that discussion, the HVAC engineer casually mentioned that he models every person as a 100 W load. I should be able to estimate that number based on the average daily calorie consumption of a person. Consider the calculation I show in Equation 1.
| Eq. 1 |  |
where
- E is the average daily energy consumption of a human being. I am using the FDA recommended value of 2000 calories.
- T is length of a day.
The use of 100 W per person seems like a reasonable average number.
I’ve heard the 100W figure for humans as well.
Once I was volunteering at a science day thing for kids, and the room I was helping in involved a 1W microwave transmitter and detector and a prism that would bend the microwave beam – one setup per two kids. One of the parents approached me, concerned that the microwave transmitters were heating up the room, because it was getting pretty warm in there.
Funny. Another example of correlation does not imply causation.
I used to volunteer at my kid’s grade school. I really enjoyed that. The only issues I ever had were with the parents – - kind of like when I coached hockey.
Mathscinotes