Saving consumable energy and maintaining the thermal comfort level are two main topics in the heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) control field. The reliability of the controller is important as well. This paper proposes a least enthalpy estimator (LEE) that combines the definition of thermal comfort level and the theory of enthalpy into a load predicting way to provide timely suitable settings for a fan coil unit (FCU) fuzzy controller used in HVAC. According to the settings, including temperature and relative humidity, the fuzzy controller can make decisions and adjust the output of the FCU system. From actual experiments, the LEE-based FCU fuzzy controller can achieve the requirements of the FCU control system such as thermal comfort, energy efficiency and reliability. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.