How nozzle air induction works
Push air into a big room through a grille and it slumps into the space around it — the fan does all the work, and most of the room never feels it. A nozzle changes the physics. When conditioned air leaves a precision nozzle at high velocity, the jet creates a pressure difference with the surrounding room air and draws it into the conditioned stream. Each nozzle ends up moving far more air than it delivers, because the room's own air is recruited to do the distribution.
That induction effect is why the equipment can shrink: smaller air handling units, lower fan energy, less ductwork — the jet does the heavy lifting. The full mechanism, and where it applies, is on the air induction and distribution page.
Why warm air stratifies — and what it costs you
Warm air rises. In a conventionally heated building it keeps rising until the ceiling stops it, and the temperature gradient in a typical warehouse runs 0.5 to 1.0 degrees per metre of height. Give a building 10 metres of headroom and the air at the roof can be 10 degrees warmer than the air around your people. Every one of those degrees is heat you paid for, parked where nobody works.
De-stratification fans push the warm air back down, but it rises again — they manage the symptom with added moving parts and electricity. The engineering answers, from fans to full air-distribution redesign, are compared on the destratification page.
Relative humidity explained
The word doing the work is relative. The amount of moisture air can hold depends on its temperature, so relative humidity moves every time the temperature does — which is why a facility with wide operating bands and rapid temperature swings can never hold a humidity specification, no matter how much dehumidification is bolted on. Stable humidity starts with stable temperature.
That's why humidity control is usually product-storage-led and built on top of a full temperature-control system: a matrix of sensors across the space, with chill and reheat coils or dedicated dehumidifiers and humidifiers holding exceptionally tight tolerances. The full picture is on the temperature and humidity control page.
Frost protection and your sprinklers
Frost protection exists first for one reason: a fire-sprinkler system only works if the water in its pipework can't freeze. The design target is straightforward — keep the internal area at or above 5°C through the coldest night of the year — and our method is to circulate the heat the building already generates internally, using nozzle air distribution. Done well, the system rarely needs to generate heat at all, which is why it's so inexpensive to run.
Where heat is needed, it can come from gas, DX or low-temperature hot water — and heat pumps are viable too, though a frost-protection start is the hardest operating condition a heat pump faces. How we've engineered around that is on the frost protection page.
How computer modelling de-risks a design
The most expensive place to discover a design flaw is a finished building. Modelling moves that discovery to the desk: for complex installations we model thermal behaviour under all operating conditions before anything is manufactured, and every nozzle's size, spacing and angle is computer-calculated for the specific building geometry. The balance is engineered before anything is built — which is why there's nothing to adjust on site afterwards.
What gets modelled, and what the outputs look like, is on the performance modelling page.
What ±1.0°C uniformity means in practice
It means the air at 12 metres is effectively the same temperature as the air at 1 metre — floor to ceiling, wall to wall, across the entire space. That single number is the difference between a specification and a fact: chocolate degrades quickly under temperature variation, pharmaceuticals must be scrapped if they get too warm, and people slow down fast when they're too hot or cold. Uniformity is what makes a setpoint mean something everywhere product sits and people work.
The technology that delivers it — computer-calculated nozzles, no dampers, no moving parts at high level — is explained on the Balanced JET Technology page.
A library that grows
These entries exist because clients asked the questions. If the one you brought isn't answered here yet, ask us directly — the honest answer usually becomes the next entry.
Why Jet Environmental
- 35+ years of industrial climate-control engineering behind every answer
- Physics explained in the language of the people accountable for the building
- Every entry links to the full engineering page, not a sales pitch
- Written by the team that designs, manufactures, installs and maintains the systems
- A growing library — the questions our clients ask become the next entries
