For Owners of Portable Air Conditioning at work/home

[pp05]

I'm looking to get air conditioning but have a few questions.

If you use just the fan only mode in the aircon unit - are these just as powerful/effective cooling as a normal fan equivalent.

also how much extra cost has been added on average for you to operate air conditioning for a few hours a day (esp if your one is 8000btu unit).

[oolon]

I got my aircon unit from B&Q, its a cyclone branded unit, to be honest I don't know how much it costs to run as I try and not turn it on, and do my best during the summer not to turn on my better machines. However I do run it as a fan all most all the time, as it is MUCH more effective than a normal fan, the reason is because the he fan does not just blow the air into the room again it blows alot of it out the back. If you get a portable unit it is worth getting a builder to cut a hole in the wall to plumb the thing to the outside world. While you can use a window, you can't really have that open while you are out. Also warm air will not flow back into the room to the same degree. Aircon units are also temperature operated so you can program it to come on at say 28C however this does mean the fan will run all the time. Clearly things change dependent on outside temperature, to get the best out of your aircon, make sure you open the window at night when it is off, so heat is not retained overnight. if your room is hot during the winter consider and the room is upstairs consider removing loft insulation from above the room.

I always though a nice idea would be to connect a water cooled system to a earth loop heating system so the heat could be reused.

[pp05]

Originally Posted by oolon

I got my aircon unit from B&Q, its a cyclone branded unit, to be honest I don't know how much it costs to run as I try and not turn it on, and do my best during the summer not to turn on my better machines. However I do run it as a fan all most all the time, as it is MUCH more effective than a normal fan, the reason is because the he fan does not just blow the air into the room again it blows alot of it out the back. If you get a portable unit it is worth getting a builder to cut a hole in the wall to plumb the thing to the outside world. While you can use a window, you can't really have that open while you are out. Also warm air will not flow back into the room to the same degree.

Aircon units are also temperature operated so you can program it to come on at say 28C however this does mean the fan will run all the time. Clearly things change dependent on outside temperature, to get the best out of your aircon, make sure you open the window at night when it is off, so heat is not retained overnight. if your room is hot during the winter consider and the room is upstairs consider removing loft insulation from above the room.

I always though a nice idea would be to connect a water cooled system to a earth loop heating system so the heat could be reused.

Very interesting about the fan only mode. Didn't know that. Thanks Oolon.

What I was thinking was to rent it initially and see how much it will use and workout the costs from that.

[oolon]

Seeing as there are no other replies to this, I did some calculations for you now i have a power meter. My Unit takes 2W it standby mode. 98W when run with the fan on high speed extraction and 1000W When it is running flat out. It ramps up from 650->1000W over the period of 10 Minutes, and will run until the room reaches the set temperature. 1KW of power gives me about 3KW of cooling, So if its just pumping out the heat from a room its 1/3 addition cost on your power bill more if you want it to be cooler than outside. So use free cooling when you can, like opening the windows at night, and turning off the machines you don't need and replacing things do need on all the time with low power versions when you can. That is why I bought myself an Atom machine for web surfing.