Air Conditioning by Building Type

Why the building type drives the design

The question people usually ask first is "how much does air conditioning cost per square metre?" It is a reasonable question and it has no useful answer, because floor area is one of the weakest predictors of cooling load in a commercial building.

What actually determines the load is the combination of internal heat gains — people, lighting, equipment — and external gains, mostly solar through glazing, plus the load imposed by bringing in fresh air. Those vary enormously by building type. So does the pattern: an office peaks mid-afternoon on a summer weekday and drops to nothing overnight, while a comms room within that same office runs flat around the clock.

And the constraints vary as much as the loads. A retail unit cannot be shut for a fortnight. A listed building may not take external plant. A warehouse has nowhere sensible to put indoor units at low level. A restaurant has to balance a large kitchen extract against make-up air or the front door will not close properly. Those practical realities shape the design as much as the heat load calculation does.

Offices

The defining characteristic is that different parts of the building need different things at the same time. A south-facing meeting room with full-height glazing needs cooling on a March morning while the north-facing open-plan area on the same floor still needs heating. That simultaneity is what makes heat-recovery VRF such a natural fit for offices, and it is why zoning by aspect matters more than zoning by department.

The other office-specific issues are commercial rather than technical: who pays — landlord or tenant — how after-hours cooling is charged in a multi-tenant building, what happens at dilapidations, and how the system contributes to the EPC that determines whether the space can be let at all under MEES. Read more on office air conditioning.

Retail

Retail's distinguishing feature is that the building is deliberately open to the outside. A shopfront held open through trading hours is an enormous, continuous infiltration load that no amount of clever plant selection removes — it has to be designed for, usually with air curtains and by accepting a load that would look absurd in an office of the same size.

Add heavy display lighting, variable footfall, landlord restrictions on where external plant can go in a shopping centre, and the fact that the work almost always has to happen outside trading hours, and retail becomes a distinctive problem. Read more on retail and shop air conditioning.

Warehousing and industrial

Here the honest answer is often "do not cool the whole building". A large warehouse has an enormous volume, poor insulation, significant roof solar gain and very few people in it. Cooling the entire volume to office conditions is usually neither affordable nor necessary.

What is usually right instead is targeting the cooling where it matters — the people, the process, or the temperature-sensitive stock — and dealing with the rest through ventilation and destratification. That is a different conversation from the one most suppliers open with. Read more on warehouse and industrial cooling.

Restaurants, pubs and commercial kitchens

Hospitality is the most technically involved of the four, because the kitchen extract system dominates everything. A large extract rate has to be balanced by an equivalent supply of make-up air, and when it is not, the building goes into negative pressure — front doors become hard to open, cold draughts pull through the dining room, and in the worst cases combustion appliances are affected.

Layer on grease-laden air that fouls condensers and creates a fire risk in ductwork, front-of-house comfort next to a very hot back-of-house, late-night plant noise beside residential neighbours, and cellar cooling running around the clock, and hospitality needs the whole site considered together rather than one system at a time. Read more on restaurant and kitchen ventilation.

These are scoping ranges, not quotations — see the cost guides for what actually moves a price.

What every sector has in common

Whatever the building, the same fundamentals decide whether the result is any good. The load must be calculated per zone rather than assumed. The system must be commissioned and the record kept, with measured figures rather than tick boxes. The controls must match how the building is actually occupied. And the same two legal duties attach to the air conditioning regardless of what the building does: F-Gas leak checking and record-keeping, and a TM44 inspection where effective rated output exceeds 12 kW.

Our commercial air conditioning overview covers the system families and the operator duties in detail, and the cost guide sets out indicative pricing and the variables that move it.

Frequently asked questions

How much does commercial air conditioning cost per square metre?

There is no reliable per-square-metre figure, because floor area is a weak predictor of cooling load. The load comes from occupancy, lighting, equipment and solar gain, which vary enormously between building types of identical size. A proper load calculation is the only way to get a meaningful price, and any quote produced without one is guesswork.

Does my building type change which system I should install?

Substantially. Offices commonly suit heat-recovery VRF because different aspects need heating and cooling at once; retail is dominated by open-shopfront infiltration and display lighting; warehouses usually call for targeted spot or process cooling rather than whole-volume cooling; and hospitality is driven by the balance between kitchen extract and make-up air.

Do the same regulations apply whatever the building is?

Yes for the core duties. F-Gas leak checking and record-keeping apply to any refrigerant-bearing plant, and the TM44 air conditioning inspection duty applies to any building whose air conditioning exceeds 12 kW effective rated output. Some sectors add their own requirements, such as TR19 Grease for kitchen extract ductwork.

We design and install commercial air conditioning across every commercial building type in the UK. Start with the commercial air conditioning overview, browse the full system range, check the cost guides, or request a quote.