Size of Heat Pump in Tons

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tom baker

tom baker

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I have a Payne Heat pump and would like to know how many "tons" capacity it is. its a
Product PH12NA036000ABAA
Model PH12NA036-B

About ten years old and I have the manual but not sure what to look for
 
Look for the cooling capacity in BTU per hour. 12000 BTU per hour is 1 ton of cooling.

At a guess I'd say the unit is 36000 BTU per hour and thus 3 tons of cooling, just from the model number, not from any real knowledge.
 
winnie said:
Look for the cooling capacity in BTU per hour. 12000 BTU per hour is 1 ton of cooling.

At a guess I'd say the unit is 36000 BTU per hour and thus 3 tons of cooling, just from the model number, not from any real knowledge.
Click to expand...

My thoughts too. The 036 in the Model No. is a clue
 
tom baker said:
I have a Payne Heat pump and would like to know how many "tons" capacity it is. its a
Product PH12NA036000ABAA
Model PH12NA036-B

About ten years old and I have the manual but not sure what to look for
Click to expand...

Please search the web using the model #. My search yielded 34,400 BTUh rating (036-B) or a TC of 2.87 tons. Here.
 
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Whether the actual is 34,400 BTU or 36000 BTU, it's all still considered a 3-ton system, and the model number will almost always have a "036" in it somewhere.

Below 2-tons, you'll usually just see the BTUs listed, and these would typically be window or mini-split systems. After those, the residential world is divided into tonnage as 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, and 5. Multiply by 12 and that's the number you'll usually find in the model number.
 
Just noticed than no one yet explained the obvious to OP (if not already known by him), that the 12,000 BTU/hr is the heat that needs to be removed from water to make a ton of ICE.
 
junkhound said:
Last week wired up an 18,000 BTU mini-split and it only weighed about 300 pounds :p:p
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Short pounds or long pounds?

junkhound said:
... 12,000 BTU/hr is the heat that needs to be removed from water to make a ton of ICE.
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Um, no. "12,000 BTU/hour" isn't even a measure of heat; it's a measure of power. The amount of heat that needs to be removed from a ton of water to turn it into ice is closer to 300 kBTU than twelve. And it's BTU, not BTU per hour.

About a century and a half ago, in the early days of mechanical refrigeration, icehouse operators asked refrigeration salesmen, "What'll this do for me?" Their response: "This machine will provide the same cooling effect as consuming a ton of ice every day." And the refrigeration ton was born.

But we no longer use icehouses. It would be a good thing if we also quit using refrigeration tons.
(HVACR engineers are among the slowest to adopt new ideas ... if something introduced in 1799 can still be considered "new". Many of them still use Roman Numeral prefixes.)

<rant>
One more example of a good reason to ditch the British system of weights & measures and use metric.

In the metric system, there are only seven base units to learn and just ONE unit of refrigeration capacity, the Watt, (or kilowatt, megawatt, et at.) No confusion and no need for unit conversion.
(there's also ONE unit of efficiency, the dimensionless ε -- no need to fart around with EER, SEER, COP or kW/ton)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intern...ystem_of_Units
</rant>
 
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drcampbell said:
Short pounds or long pounds?


Um, no. "12,000 BTU/hour" isn't even a measure of heat; it's a measure of power. The amount of heat that needs to be removed from a ton of water to turn it into ice is closer to 300 kBTU than twelve. And it's BTU, not BTU per hour.

[/url]
</rant>
Click to expand...

Yes, thanks for the good clarification - I should have been more specific - e.g makes 1 ton of ice per day. 144 BTU/pound *2000 = 288,000 BTU. Divide by 24 = 12,000 BTU/hr.
 
drcampbell said:
<rant>
One more example of a good reason to ditch the British system of weights & measures and use metric.

In the metric system, there are only seven base units to learn and just ONE unit of refrigeration capacity, the Watt, (or kilowatt, megawatt, et at.) No confusion and no need for unit conversion.
(there's also ONE unit of efficiency, the dimensionless ε -- no need to fart around with EER, SEER, COP or kW/ton)
Click to expand...
Yes, it has it's merits and I've been advocating that on here for years!
Just one small correction. Although commonly, and incorrectly, called metric, it is SI. (Système Internationale d'Unités,)
You can't measure Joules by the metre.
 
Nothing wrong with "metric system." Metrics are measurements of things, not necessarily lengths. You can use a formal foreign name if you wish, but it's not incorrect to use a name that more people actually understand.

Just one small correction: "its" has no apostrophe when used as a possessive pronoun.

Besoeker3 said:
Yes, it has it's merits and I've been advocating that on here for years!
Just one small correction. Although commonly, and incorrectly, called metric, it is SI. (Système Internationale d'Unités,)
You can't measure Joules by the metre.
Click to expand...
 
MAC702 said:
Nothing wrong with "metric system." Metrics are measurements of things, not necessarily lengths. You can use a formal foreign name if you wish, but it's not incorrect to use a name that more people actually understand.

Just one small correction: "its" has no apostrophe when used as a possessive pronoun.
Click to expand...

You are correct. No apostrophe. I don't normally make many grammatical mistakes. Please accept my apology.
But the term "metrics" has a different meaning to "metric system".

Anyway, I'm an old fellow. I grew up with Imperial measures. Yards, feet, inches, chains, furlongs, leagues, bushels, acres, etc. At secondary school (age eleven onward) science was in the CGS system. Centimetre, gram, second. Later, and at university, we had MKS. Then SI. All my engineering calculations used that.

But we Brits still want Imperial units for some things. Ask someone their height and you will most likely get an answer in feet and inches, their weight in stones and pounds.
An interesting anomaly is found at the British pub. If I have a beer, it is sold by the pint. My dear wife has a wine and that's measured in millilitres.
 
Besoeker3 said:
... Just one small correction. Although commonly, and incorrectly, called metric, it is SI. (Système Internationale d'Unités,) ...
Click to expand...
Right you are. I took a wild guess that this audience -- particularly the Americans here -- would vaguely recognize the "metric" system, but have an eyes-glaze-over moment were I to mention SI.
 
As I get older I find that I am inherently oppositional. I push people in my lab to use Newton meters for torque and radians per second for speed (it helps when one is writing the experiment control software...) At the same time when I am forced to use _metric_ (not SI units) I get ornery and ask for thinks like dodecimeters of stuff.

When I am told _use metric_ and then have to deal with 'pressure' in kg/cm^2, or speed in km/hr my CDO goes haywire (CDO, its kinda like OCD, but the letters are in proper order....)

And then I remember that while SI is a self consistent system of units, the units themselves are pretty arbitrary and their selection quite political. Think about our unit of length; given what we know now, using the distance light travels in 1/1,000,000,000 second _exactly_ as the unit of length would be much nicer than the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 second.

Sorry, just rambling :)
 
winnie said:
When I am told _use metric_ and then have to deal with 'pressure' in kg/cm^2, or speed in km/hr my CDO goes haywire (CDO, its kinda like OCD, but the letters are in proper order....)

And then I remember that while SI is a self consistent system of units, the units themselves are pretty arbitrary and their selection quite political.
Sorry, just rambling :)
Click to expand...
Ramble on, sir.
But can you shed a light on why you think the units have a political aspect?
 
Besoeker3 said:
Ramble on, sir.
But can you shed a light on why you think the units have a political aspect?
Click to expand...

'The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.'

One critical aspect of units of measurement is how technically sound they are, how reliably they can be implemented or derived from basic physical quantities, how self consistent the units are, etc. By this metric, SI is hands down better than imperial units.

But a separate critical aspect is how well you can convince people to _use_ the same system of units. And convincing people to _use_ units is at its core a political act.

Is there any _technical_ benefit to making 0 longitude Greenwich rather than Paris? That selection was politics.

Is there any _technical_ benefit to the particular unit of length used in SI?

Sometimes the politics is in a very small group of people, eg. the recent vote to redefine the kilogram in terms of Plank's constant rather than something else.

IMHO technical standards are by their nature political things, and this is true for standards for units of measure.

-Jon
 
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