balance point

The outside air temperature at which a building's heating or cooling systems begin to operate. For heating systems, this is referred to as the heating balance point; for cooling systems, this is referred to as the cooling balance point. A building's balance points are used to calculate cooling and heating degree days that are a measure of the building's demand for energy. The Energy application can calculate the balance points for your buildings as part of the weather model data it creates when you run the Update Calculations task, or you can manually enter these temperatures.