By premises
Air conditioning for an office
Size for people and equipment, not just floor area — a room of twelve staff with as many machines carries a load a bedroom never does. Then zone it, because a corner meeting room used twice a day should not be cooled by the same thermostat as the open floor.
Last reviewed
Occupancy and equipment are the load
Every person and every machine in an office produces heat continuously. A dozen staff with laptops, monitors, a printer and a small rack add up to a meaningful load on top of the building's own heat gain — and it is a load that is entirely absent from a floor-area calculation, which is why offices sized that way run short by mid-afternoon.
Zoning beats one big unit
An office is rarely uniformly occupied. Meeting rooms sit empty most of the day, the window side runs warmer than the interior, and server or store rooms have their own requirements. Separate units on separate thermostats let you cool what is occupied, which costs materially less than holding one temperature across the whole floor.
The weekday pattern is an opportunity
An office cools five days a week during daylight, which is the best possible match for a solar array — cooling load and generation peak together. That makes AC and solar a single conversation for an office rather than two separate purchases, and it is worth having them together rather than a year apart.
Placement around desks, not around walls
An indoor unit blowing directly onto a desk makes that person cold while the far side of the room stays warm, and the usual response is someone dropping the set point for everybody. Air should reach the occupied area without a jet on any one seat — a placement decision at installation that avoids a permanent thermostat argument.
How should an office be air conditioned?
What temperature should an office be set to?
A moderate set point with good air movement is more comfortable and far cheaper than a very low one with still air, because each degree lower costs meaningfully more to hold. The common failure is one uncomfortable person dropping the whole floor's set point, which zoning and sensible placement solve better than policy does.
Do we need a separate unit for the server room?
If there is a rack running around the clock, yes — its requirements are different in kind from the office's and it needs cooling when the office AC is off. Running the general office system overnight to protect a rack is expensive and unreliable. That is a distinct problem with its own answer.
Should we run the AC at weekends?
Generally no, beyond anything protecting equipment. Letting the building warm over a weekend costs a longer pull-down on Monday morning, but that is far cheaper than holding temperature for two days in an empty office. Where a server room exists, it is the exception and it should be on its own system.
Rather have it done?
AC installation is a sizing decision followed by a plumbing job: tonnage matched to the room, indoor and outdoor units sited for airflow, pipe run kept short and lagged, and the system vacuumed properly before gas is released. Fitting starts at PKR 8,000, and supply-and-fit for a 1.5 ton inverter unit starts near PKR 140,000.
New air conditioner supply and installation in Islamabad — prices and scope