Trampoline Park HVAC: Sizing Cooling for a Jumping Floor

Two buildings of 30,000 sq ft (2,790 m²) can need cooling plants that differ by a factor of three. One is a distribution warehouse with fifteen people inside it. The other is a trampoline park running a full session.

The climate is the same. The roof assembly can be the same. What changes is that every person on the jumping floor is a heater of roughly 2,200 Btu/h, and that floor holds more of them per square foot than almost any other commercial occupancy.

This article does the trampoline park HVAC arithmetic in the open, using measured metabolic data from peer-reviewed studies, published electricity prices and one national energy benchmark. You can substitute your own numbers at every step, which is the point of showing the working.

One note on scope. We build jumping floors, structures and padding, not air-conditioning plants. We write about HVAC because undersized cooling is one of the three most common first-summer complaints we hear from operators.

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1. Peak load is set by people, not by floor area

A cooling load is a sum of four terms. The people in the room. The outdoor air you bring in for them. The envelope, the glazing and the sun. And the lights, screens and pumps inside the building.

In an office, the first two terms are small. A seated worker releases about 400 Btu/h, and the fresh air that worker needs adds a few hundred more. The walls and the sun dominate, which is why contractors size offices on floor area and get away with it.

On a jumping floor the order inverts. A child bouncing hard releases five to eight times what a seated adult releases, and the density is nothing like an office. If 12,000 sq ft (1,115 m²) of a 30,000 sq ft box is jumping surface and the posted occupancy limit puts 200 people on it, that is 60 sq ft (5.6 m²) per jumper. In an office the same 60 sq ft holds one desk.

So the practical rule is this: size a trampoline park on its occupant load, and use floor area only to size the envelope and lighting terms. A plant sized the other way is either grossly oversized at 30 per cent occupancy or short by a third at 100 per cent, and the two failures look nothing alike on a service call.

We dealt with the annual electricity bill for a park of this size in the electricity cost per square foot. This piece is about the peak, the number that decides how much machine you buy and what the utility charges you for owning it.

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2. What a jumper actually produces: the measured data

Physiologists describe exertion in metabolic equivalents, or METs. One MET is the resting rate, defined as 3.5 millilitres of oxygen per kilogram of body mass per minute. Walking briskly is about 4 METs.

Trampoline work sits higher than most operators expect.

The number that matters for a cooling plant is the 7.77 to 11.52 MET range. Take the middle of a normal recreational session, about 8 METs, and you have a working figure that will survive a conversation with a mechanical engineer.

The limits of that figure are real. Thirteen young women in a laboratory, bouncing for five minutes under a metronome, are not two hundred children in a dodgeball court for ninety minutes. Children have a higher surface-area-to-mass ratio and a lower absolute heat output; teenagers and adults in a competitive game push toward the top of the range. Section 9 sets out exactly what this data can and cannot support.

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3. From METs to tons: the arithmetic in full

One MET consumes 3.5 millilitres of oxygen per kilogram per minute. Each litre of oxygen releases about 4.83 kilocalories at a respiratory exchange ratio near 0.85, the value measured in the aerobic half of the Eynur protocol. One kilocalorie is 3.968 Btu.

Multiply them out and one kilogram of body mass at one MET produces 3.5 millilitres per minute, which is 0.0035 litres per minute, which is 0.0169 kilocalories per minute, which is 1.01 kilocalories per hour, which is 4.02 Btu/h. The working formula is therefore 4.02 × METs × body mass in kilograms.

That gives heat output per person. The table converts it across the range of bodies you will actually see on a floor.

Now scale it. One hundred jumpers at 70 kg and 8 METs produce 225,500 Btu/h, which is 18.8 tons of cooling. Two hundred produce 37.6 tons. Three hundred produce 56.4 tons, before a single watt of lighting, solar gain or ventilation is counted.

Put the same figure on a floor-area basis and the scale becomes obvious. On 12,000 sq ft of jumping surface, 200 jumpers generate 37.6 Btu/h per square foot from their bodies alone. A modern office runs at 6 to 10 Btu/h per square foot including lights, people and equipment.

The conversion in one line: Btu/h per person = 4.02 × METs × body mass in kilograms, and one ton of refrigeration is 12,000 Btu/h.

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4. The one-ton-per-400-sq-ft rule, and why it lands close for the wrong reasons

Ask three contractors how much cooling a 30,000 sq ft trampoline park needs and you will usually hear some version of one ton per 400 to 500 sq ft. For this box that is 60 to 75 tons.

Build the load up properly and something awkward happens: the rule lands in roughly the right place for a full house, because two errors cancel. The rule overstates the envelope term per square foot, and it understates the people term, and the two mistakes meet near the middle of the occupancy range.

At 200 jumpers the rule buys about 10 per cent of spare capacity, which is a sensible margin. At 300 it is 23 per cent short, and the shortfall appears when the park is busiest and the tills are ringing.

The oversizing failure is less visible and more expensive to live with. A plant with excess sensible capacity reaches its set point quickly and then cycles. During the off cycle the coil stops removing moisture while people keep producing it, so relative humidity climbs. Operators describe the result as clammy and blame the thermostat, the insulation or the supplier. It is none of those. It is a machine that is too big for the afternoon and too small for Saturday.

Two conditions break the rule outright. Glazed façades: a wall of west-facing glass on a mall-facing park can add 10 kW before the sun is at its peak, and the rule has no term for it. High clear height is the other, and section 7 covers it.

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5. Outdoor air is a second heater

Every occupant needs fresh air, and in a hot climate that air arrives carrying heat and water vapour. This is the term most often left out of a napkin estimate, and at full occupancy it is more than half as large as the people themselves.

Take 20 cubic feet per minute per person as a working input. That figure is not a quotation from a standard: minimum outdoor-air rates depend on the occupancy classification and on the code edition your jurisdiction has adopted, and the standard is a purchased document. Your mechanical engineer must pull the actual rate. The arithmetic below shows how much the choice matters.

At 200 jumpers, 20 cfm each is 4,000 cfm. The load is 4.5 × cfm × the enthalpy difference between outdoor and indoor air, in Btu per pound. On a 35 °C (95 °F), 50 per cent relative humidity afternoon, outdoor air carries about 80.6 kJ per kilogram of dry air; at 24 °C and 50 per cent indoors the figure is about 47.8. The difference is 32.8 kJ/kg, or 14.1 Btu/lb.

So 4,000 × 4.5 × 14.1 gives 253,800 Btu/h, which is 21.2 tons of cooling bought for the sole purpose of turning outdoor air into indoor air. Double the fresh-air rate and you double that figure. It is also why an operator who props the doors open on a July afternoon watches the temperature climb for the next forty minutes.

Energy-recovery ventilation is the standard answer, and it is a trade rather than a free win. A plate or enthalpy exchanger recovers roughly half to 70 per cent of that difference, which would take the 21 tons down to somewhere between 6 and 11. In exchange you add static pressure to the fan system, a filter and a core that must be cleaned, and a maintenance item nobody at the site has been trained on.

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6. Latent load: the half of the problem the thermostat does not see

A thermometer measures sensible heat. It does not measure the water vapour that 200 bouncing people add to the air, and that vapour is what makes a park feel wrong even when the reading looks right.

At moderate-to-hard work a person releases roughly 40 per cent of metabolic heat as latent load, meaning sweat that evaporates rather than warms the room. Two hundred jumpers at 2,200 Btu/h each is 440,000 Btu/h of total heat, of which about 176,000 Btu/h is latent. Divide by the latent heat of vaporisation, roughly 1,060 Btu per pound of water, and the room gains about 166 pounds, or 75 kilograms, of water an hour.

That moisture leaves through the coil or through ventilation, or it stays. At 24 °C and 60 per cent relative humidity the dew point is about 15.7 °C. Any surface cooler than that collects water, and the surfaces that run coldest are the ones nobody inspects: the underside of a metal roof deck, uninsulated chilled-water pipework, steel at a thermal bridge, and the floor slab in the first cold snap after a humid summer.

The consequences are not cosmetic. Condensation on a spring or a frame fixing is the start of corrosion, and corrosion in a galvanised structure is slow, invisible and structural. Damp padding loses its resilience and starts to smell. A glossy floor near a door with a 15.7 °C dew point becomes a slip claim waiting to be filed.

The design target is usually 45 to 60 per cent relative humidity in the occupied zone, with surface temperatures held above the dew point by insulation rather than by hope. Materials matter here: closed-cell foams such as EPP do not take up water the way open-cell foam does, which is one reason we specify them for high-sweat zones. Our materials and quality standards set out the foam and facing specifications we work to.

This is also where the oversizing problem from section 4 returns. A cooling coil removes a fixed ratio of sensible to latent heat at a given entering condition. Run it for eight minutes in an hour and you remove eight minutes of moisture while the room generates sixty. The park ends up cold and humid, which feels worse than warm and dry.

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7. Height, stratification and where the cold air actually goes

A trampoline park needs clear height for the jumping, the climbing and the drop slides, so the ceiling ends up at 6 m to 8 m. People occupy the bottom 3 m. The rest is a reservoir.

Warm air rises, and in a tall single-volume space the air at the roof can run several degrees above the occupied zone. Every degree of that gradient is cooling you paid for and then stored where nobody stands. Round ductwork at high level discharging cold air into the top of the volume makes the problem worse rather than better: the cold air drops, but it drops where it was delivered, and the far side of the floor never sees it.

Two fixes exist and both belong in the design, not in the aftermarket. Supply air at low level or through displacement diffusers in the occupied zone, so the cool air arrives where the people are. And destratification fans that mix the upper volume down, typically sized for three to five air changes per hour of the upper zone. The fans cost little to run and they pay twice: in summer they cut the cooling load, and in winter they bring the warm air at the roof back down to floor level.

Air speed is the other parameter that gets set by feel rather than by number. In the occupied zone, 0.15 to 0.25 m/s reads as fresh. Above about 0.5 m/s it lifts dust, dries eyes and makes parents complain that the children will catch cold. A sweaty child just off a trampoline feels a 0.3 m/s draught as cold, which is why a park that is comfortable in the café is often uncomfortable on the floor.

One more interaction belongs to us rather than to the mechanical contractor. Airbags and foam pits need air movement around them, and an airbag inside a sealed plinth or a tight pit will hold heat and moisture against the fabric. Where a pit is being detailed, the airflow path should be drawn before the pit is framed, in the same way the landing margins are. We set out the geometry in landing zone design.

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8. What the plant costs to run: energy plus demand

Take the 200-jumper case: 68 tons of peak cooling. At an energy efficiency ratio of 11 Btu per watt-hour, an ordinary figure for a commercial packaged unit, the plant draws 68 × 12 ÷ 11, or 74 kW, when it runs flat out.

Annual energy depends on equivalent full-load hours, the number of hours a year the plant would have to run at full capacity to deliver the cooling it actually delivered. In a temperate climate 900 to 1,200 is typical; in a hot one, 1,800 to 2,400. At 1,200 hours the plant consumes about 89,000 kWh a year.

The Tennessee row is the one to read twice. Its energy price is 30 per cent lower than New Jersey’s, and its all-in cooling cost is 14 per cent higher, because a demand charge of $15.95 per kW is levied on the peak you set rather than on the hours you use. That peak happens in a few hundred hours a year. You pay for it in all twelve months.

The figures cross-check against national data. The EIA’s Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey puts public assembly buildings at 12.1 kWh per square foot per year on average. For this 30,000 sq ft building that implies 363,000 kWh in total, of which our 89,000 kWh of cooling is 24.5 per cent. Cooling at roughly a quarter of the electricity bill is the right order of magnitude for a public assembly building, which suggests the load model is not wildly wrong. It is not proof either: the survey category covers museums, libraries, gyms and places of worship alongside play venues, and the mix inside it is wide.

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9. What the data does and does not show

The metabolic figures are measured, the prices are published, and the rest is arithmetic with stated assumptions. Here is the boundary.

What the data supports. Recreational trampoline work falls in the 7 to 12 MET range, measured by gas analysis in two independent laboratories. The conversion from oxygen uptake to heat is standard physiology, and the constants are checkable. The electricity prices are the EIA’s published state averages for August 2026. The 12.1 kWh per square foot benchmark comes from a national survey with a documented sample design.

What it does not support. The Eynur sample is thirteen young women, and a five-minute protocol is not a ninety-minute session with rests. No park we know of publishes both its posted occupancy limit and its metered cooling consumption, so the density assumption of 60 sq ft per jumper is ours, not an industry figure. The 40 per cent latent split varies with fitness, clothing and air speed. Equivalent full-load hours are climate-specific, and a monsoon climate and a desert climate with the same cooling-degree days behave differently inside a building.

Where we are deliberately silent. We do not give equipment prices per ton. Packaged unit pricing moves with refrigerant, efficiency tier, crane access and local labour, and a number invented here would be quoted back at a contractor in another country. We also do not tell you which standard to certify against: ASTM F2970 and EN ISO 23659 cover different markets and different scopes, and our safety standards page explains how we document compliance rather than repeating a list.

The correlation trap. A hot park does not prove an undersized plant. It can be a control schedule that closes the outdoor-air damper at the wrong time, a roof with no destratification, a propped fire door, or a plant that was correct on paper and never commissioned. A load calculation tells you what to buy. Commissioning tells you whether you bought it.

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10. The decision rule

None of this predicts what your building will need. It does give you a way to check a proposal before you sign it, and to know which questions to ask when the numbers look convenient.

The one-sentence version for trampoline park HVAC: size on people, check latent capacity at part load, and treat the peak as a capital decision rather than an operating one, because in most US tariffs the peak is billed whether or not you use it.

1. Get the occupancy number first. Your posted limit, from the fire and building review, is the input that moves the answer most. Without it every other number is a guess, and the mechanical engineer will make one for you.

2. Ask for the load at 100 per cent, then at 40 per cent. A plant that works at only one of those points will fail at the other, and the failure at 40 per cent is humidity rather than heat.

3. Draw the air path before the floor plan is fixed. Low-level supply, destratification and pit ventilation all need space that is cheap at design stage and expensive afterwards. Our team can mark up a layout and the airflow it implies in one review, and you can start that with the design-to-delivery process.

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If you want to compare the jumping equipment and the accessories that sit inside this envelope, the trampoline range and the park accessories are the two lists most projects start from. Acoustic treatment, which shares ductwork and ceiling space with the air system, is covered in noise control for trampoline parks.

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FAQ

How much cooling does a trampoline park need?

Plan on roughly two to two and a half tons per 1,000 sq ft at full occupancy, which is about one ton per 400 to 500 sq ft. For a 30,000 sq ft park with 200 occupants that is 68 tons: 36.7 tons of body heat, 21.2 tons of outdoor-air load and 10 tons of envelope and lighting. The answer moves with occupancy, so establish your posted limit first.

What temperature should a trampoline park be kept at?

The usual target is 21 °C to 24 °C (70 °F to 75 °F) with 45 to 60 per cent relative humidity. The humidity band matters more than the temperature. A hall at 24 °C and 50 per cent feels better than one at 21 °C and 70 per cent, and the second condition is what an oversized plant produces when the room is busy.

Do trampoline parks need dehumidification?

Yes, in any humid climate and in most temperate ones at full occupancy. Two hundred jumpers add about 75 kg of water vapour an hour to the room, and a cooling coil removes moisture only while it is running. A dedicated outdoor-air unit with a cold coil, or an enthalpy wheel, handles the latent load independently of the temperature set point.

Why is my trampoline park hot even with the air conditioning running?

Three causes account for most cases. The plant was sized on floor area rather than occupant count, so it lags at peak. Cold air is delivered at high level into a 7 m volume and never reaches the floor. Or the outdoor-air load is larger than assumed because the doors stay open. An hour of logging on supply and return temperatures separates the three.

Can portable air conditioners cool a trampoline park?

Only if they are ducted out of the space. A single-duct portable unit pulls room air, cools part of it and exhausts the rest outside, which draws hot outdoor air back in through every door and leaves a net cooling effect close to zero. Spot cooling works for a reception desk. It does nothing for a 30,000 sq ft jumping floor.

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Sources

1. Eynur A, Ünveren A, Harmancı H, et al. “Energy expenditure in women who participate to recreational mini-trampoline activities.” BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation, 2026. PMID 42152023. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42152023
2. Rodrigues GAA, Rodrigues PC, da Silva FF, et al. “Mini-trampoline enhances cardiovascular responses during a stationary running exergame in adults.” 2019. PMC6358523. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6358523
3. Alexander K, Clement T, Draper N. “Developing a mathematical model to predict energy expenditure while bouncing on a trampoline.” European Journal of Sport Science, 2020. PMID 32036776. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32036776
4. Karakollukçu M, Aslan CS, Paoli A, et al. “Effects of mini trampoline exercise on male gymnasts’ physiological parameters: a pilot study.” Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness, 2014. PMID 24921617. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24921617
5. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A, average retail price of electricity by state, August 2026 data, released 23 October 2026. eia.gov electric power monthly
6. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey 2018, Table C22, electricity consumption and expenditure intensities by building type, released December 2022. eia.gov cbecs table c22
7. Jersey Central Power & Light, Tariff for Electric Service, Part III general service, demand charges effective 1 June 2026. firstenergycorp.com JCP&L tariff
8. Athens Utilities Board, TVA general service schedule, demand charges effective May 2026. aub.org electric rates