Anyone who manages people in a hot warehouse faces two kinds of pressure. The first is the pressure they get from their employees who are suffering the effects of an overheated workplace.
Fortunately, the solution to this unpleasant kind of pressure is another kind of pressure: the physical pressure it takes to actually cool down your hot warehouse.
Let’s explore how the good kind of pressure can eliminate the bad kind of pressure.
How Air Flows in a Warehouse
Air moves because of pressure. It’s true with the weather in the atmosphere and it’s true with the climate inside a building. Without pressure, the air stays put. A hot room with no pressure to create airflow will stay hot.
Wind outside is caused by high atmospheric pressure pushing the air to areas where there’s lower pressure. The same thing happens inside a building. Pressure is required to move air, whether it’s moving cool air into a hot room or warm air into a cooler room.
Air, being a fluid, behaves in much the same way as water. If you have a cup of hot water and want to make it cool, you can pour cold water into the cup, displacing it with warmer water. If you have a room of hot air and want to make it cooler, you can flow cold air into the room, displacing the hot air with cooler air.
That’s how air conditioning works—displacing hot air with cool air again and again until the desired temperature is reached. Air conditioning, however, requires a high amount of electric energy to operate, and electric energy is expensive to buy. And in a huge space like a warehouse, those energy bills can be staggeringly high.
Fortunately, there’s a more efficient and cost-effective way to displace hot air in a warehouse: big ceiling fans.
How Big Fans Affect Airflow in a Warehouse
The goal of a fan is to move air where you want it, providing comfort via airspeed. A fan provides the pressure needed to move the air where you want it to go.
Small fans do this on a very small scale. They can provide airflow for a relatively tiny area—up to a few feet—which is typically enough for only one person.
But large fans—commonly referred to as HVLS (high-volume, low-speed) fans—are able to move massive amounts of air throughout a large space, up to more than 100 feet from the source (or “from the fan itself”). These large fans provide the pressure needed to force air downward and outward, providing airflow that makes people feel cooler.
If the air isn’t conditioned (that is, made cooler), then why does it feel cooler? The answer is evaporative cooling. When a body’s temperature increases, it releases sweat in an effort to cool the body. When air flows over the moist skin, it makes a person feel cooler.
In short, HVLS fans provide the pressure to force massive amounts of airflow through a large space, providing a breeze that blows across your skin, making you feel cooler.
Big Ass Fans Improves Airflow in Your Warehouse
The best way to take advantage of the good kind of pressure (and eliminate the bad kind of pressure) is to install a Big Ass fan in your warehouse.
Our HVLS fans are the industry standard when it comes to providing maximum airflow through your industrial facility. Big Ass Fans engineers have perfected the motors, gearboxes, airfoils, and other industrial-grade parts that set our warehouse fans apart from the competition.
You can see for yourself exactly how to improve the airflow in your warehouse with a SpecLab® airflow analysis from Big Ass Fans. It uses computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software to visualize and quantify the airflow in your warehouse. And it’s free!
