Modern Mechanical and Electrical Equipment for Buildings: A Practical Field Guide to HVAC and Electrical Equipment, Building Systems, Controls, Instal

By William H. Crawford, P.E

You Learned the Theory. Nobody Taught You the Building.
Sizing an air-handling unit is a psychrometric problem, a fluid-flow problem, an acoustic problem, an electrical load problem, a controls problem, and a code-compliance problem at the same time. Solve six of them and violate the seventh, and you have not solved anything.

Thermodynamics, heat transfer, and circuit theory are taught as separate subjects, each of them rigorously. Then a real building arrives and refuses to announce which subject it belongs to. Students discover that no course prepared them to coordinate. Practising engineers, fluent inside one discipline, must work alongside three whose governing logic they were never taught.

The book moves from foundations, to equipment, to distribution, to integration. Every equation is derived or its origin explained. Every variable carries its units. Every worked example states its data, assumptions, and objective, then tracks units line by line to a boxed answer, and the practice problems that follow are answerable from the chapter itself.
What You Will Be Able To DoCalculate design heating and cooling loads, and understand why cooling load is not instantaneous heat gainSelect boilers, chillers, air handlers, pumps, and heat rejection on performance rather than catalogue habitSize ducts and pipes, and find the true operating point where the fan or pump curve meets the system curveApply ventilation and filtration requirements, control pressure relationships, and size energy recoverySize services, feeders, transformers, generators, and transfer equipment, with grounding and arc-flash clearances respectedDesign lighting by the lumen method and judge quality, not illuminance aloneWrite control sequences, then verify through commissioning that the installation performs as designedSeparate what is established, what is estimated, and what remains professional judgementChapters run in dependency order and each states its prerequisites, so the book works read straight through or opened at one problem. Behind them sit consolidated design data, a notation appendix, a glossary, a full answer key, and an index.

Who It Is For
Upper-level students in architectural, mechanical, and electrical engineering; practising design engineers; architects and construction managers who need to follow what their consultants are doing; and the contractors and facility engineers who inherit the result.

Open it at the chapter your current project needs, and start building the judgement that holds all four disciplines together.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HG4KKP6D
• ISBN13: 9798194150717
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 458 Pages
• Weight: 2.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 8.5" x 11.0"