I was wondering this while watching Barbie in a sold out house on a heat advisory day in NYC.
The air conditioner had definitely malfunctioned because it was incredibly hot in the theater but it must have been running or else it would have been unbearable to be inside with that many people. The outside temp (extreme) and the number of people inside and their body heat defeated this air conditioning system but I was wondering how? How do institutions compensate for large crowds and extreme outdoor heat and what is happening when the ac is working by outmatched by circumstances?
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I work in commercial HVAC design. We use published values for how many people are estimated in a space at peak usage and how much heat and humidity they produce while doing that activity (along with any electrical equipment, how much heat is transferred through the roof and walls, etc). This tells us how many tons of cooling we need to provide. It is a balance as well, because if you oversize the equipment it can counterintuitively increase the humidity in the space, and will also cause the units to turn on and off more frequently (short cycling), which causes wear on the equipment.
In your experience, it’s possible that one of the HVAC units wasn’t working, or maybe it was just a poorly designed system which wasn’t able to keep up with peak load.
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