This guide gives the heat an LED wall adds to a room, from the panel datasheet: which of the two draw figures the cooling design uses, the conversion to BTU per hour, the figures per square metre for five install panels, and where the heat leaves the cabinet. It is what the system sheet prints, written out.
An LED wall turns nearly all of its electrical input into heat at the cabinet: in the drivers, the power supplies and the LEDs themselves. The small share that leaves as light is absorbed by the walls, the floor and the people in front of it, and becomes heat in the same room. For the cooling design, the heat load is the electrical draw. There is no separate heat figure to look for, and a datasheet that prints one is printing the draw again in other units.
The figure is in kilowatts on the sheet and in BTU per hour on the HVAC drawing. One kilowatt is 3,412 BTU per hour, and 12,000 BTU per hour is one ton of refrigeration. A wall drawing 3.5 kW is 11,900 BTU per hour, or about one ton.
Every sheet publishes two draws. Maximum is full white at full brightness, and the electrical supply is sized on it, because a white test pattern or a failed source can put it there. Typical draw is what content averages, about a third of maximum, and it is the continuous load the room has to shed.
The cooling design wants both numbers with their roles named: typical as the design load, maximum as the peak the system must survive for an hour without the room running away. A lobby wall at half brightness on corporate content sits below typical for most of its life; a retail wall on bright, fast content sits above it. Where the sheet publishes no typical figure, the planner uses a third of maximum and marks it estimated.
The draw scales with area, so per square metre is the figure to carry between screens of different sizes. From the makers’ own sheets, typical and maximum:
A 5.00 × 3.00 m wall of Absen PL2.5 Pro V2 is 10 × 6 cabinets, 15 m². Typical draw is 230 × 15 = 3.45 kW, about 11,800 BTU per hour; maximum is 680 × 15 = 10.2 kW, about 34,800 BTU per hour. The room’s cooling is designed on the first figure and checked against the second.
The same area in Sharp LD-FE093 modules draws 1.4 kW typical and 2.5 kW maximum: a fine-pitch install module built for close viewing and 600 nits needs a fraction of the power of a 1,500 nit panel, and the heat follows the same ratio. Brightness is the largest single lever on heat. A wall calibrated to 40% of its maximum brightness draws and heats roughly in proportion.
The heat leaves at the rear of the cabinet, where the power supplies sit, and rises. A wall built into a recess or against a solid surface needs an air path behind it and out at the top, or the top rows run hotter than the bottom and the colour drifts with them. Front-service modules are made to sit close to the wall behind them, and their sheets give the clearance; rear-service cabinets need the access gap anyway, and that gap is the air path.
Whether a cabinet has fans is on the sheet when the maker states it, and the operating temperature range is on almost every sheet. A fanless cabinet in a closed recess is the case that fails, and it fails slowly, over the first summer.
Sheets do not publish inrush current, which matters for the breakers and not for the cooling, and they rarely publish the heat of the processor and the media player, which sit in a rack elsewhere and are small next to the wall. The processor’s own sheet gives its draw; the wall draws in the kilowatts.
The planner’s system sheet prints typical and maximum draw in kilowatts and BTU per hour for every screen on the job, from the same datasheet figures, so the HVAC question is answered on the same page as the power and the weight.
RigPlan does this arithmetic for you. Describe the screen once and it gives the circuits and phases, the heat, the weight and load, the looped data and the processor, on one sheet for the quote. Free on screen, with no sign-up; the installation planner says what it covers.
Plan an installAs much as it draws. Indoor install panels draw about 100 to 260 W/m² on typical content and 170 to 770 W/m² at full white, from the makers’ sheets, so a 15 m² wall puts 1.4 to 3.9 kW into the room on typical content. One kilowatt is 3,412 BTU per hour.
Design on typical draw as the continuous load, and check that the system survives the maximum for an hour. Maximum is full white at full brightness, which content reaches for moments, not days. Where the sheet publishes no typical figure, use a third of maximum and say so.
Yes, roughly in proportion. Draw and heat scale with the light output, so a wall calibrated to 40% of its maximum brightness runs at a fraction of the sheet figures. The sheet figures are at 100%, which is the right basis for the design.