Air Conditioners

An air conditioner is also popularly abbreviated as air con or AC. It is an appliance used for adjusting the humidity levels and temperature of air within a closed proximity.

History of Air conditioners

In 1902, the 1st large-scale electrical air conditioning system was designed by Willis Haviland Carrier, a famous chemical engineer. He invented the concept of air conditioning, which was applied in Rome for the first time. According to this concept, sufficient amount of water was dispersed on the walls to reduce the heat. In Medieval Persia, similar techniques were put into practice by making use of wind towers and cisterns that minimized and cooled the buildings during hot summer.

Coming to comparatively modern invention, while circulating heat through machinery to offers air conditioning and cools only air, it doesn’t cool the entire building. In early days, the air conditioning was used by only high class communities. Contrasting early days, now, the air conditioning has become a need to sustain in adverse climatic conditions, rather than a luxurious appliance.

As mentioned earlier, cisterns were used in the operation of air conditioners. Coming to the functionality of cisterns, they grasp rain water and by circulation of air by wind towers on the rain water, cool air is obtained. After some time, the cistern rain water is evaporated and the cisterns start collecting rain water again.

In medieval Egypt, ventilators were designed and used to provide air conditioning to many buildings in Cairo.

Insight to Air Conditioners

If you stay in a really hot geographic location, you may not have a choice but to look for an air conditioner.

So, now let us try to understand how air conditioning is really carried out, with the help of pictorial representation for better understanding.

Air conditioners are produced in different sizes, prices, and capacities. One of the most popular and well known forms of ACs is window air conditioner. Its operation is very simple, and it turns out to be the most economical way to reduce the temperature of certain area.

People living in suburbs generally have a condenser set up in their backyards. If you observe an apartment, you can find lot of condensers fixed to wall for each flat or room.

Most office and business buildings use condensing setups on their surfaces, and if you go to an airport, you can notice that malls and warehouses may have ten or twenty condensing setups fixed on their surfaces.

In case of office premises, one can find plenty of cooling towers, which are coupled to the AC system. Although all machines look different from each other, they operate on the same basic principle.

How Do Air Conditioners Work

Most of us feel that an air conditioner cools the rooms just by passing cool air. What’s really going on is the hot air from the room is being eliminated and circulated back in as cool air. This circulation continues up to the room reaches required temperature.

Basically, an air conditioner is a refrigerator, which doesn’t have an insulated box. It utilizes the moisture of a refrigerant, such as Freon, to offer cooling.

The compressor squeezes cool Freon gas, and converts it into warm, superior-pressure Freon gas. This is shown in diagram and the red colored thing is the high-pressure Freon gas. This hot gas moves through a group of coils to dispel its heat and turns into liquid.

Liquid of the Freon moves via an extended valve, and in this procedure it vanishes to be cold, inferior-pressure Freon gas (light blue colored gas in the above diagram). This cool gas circulates via a group of coils that permit the gas to grasp heat and reduces the heat in the room.

Air conditioners clean the stale air in closed proximities – be it a small room, a big hall, a massive office, or a monstrous mall. Most of the indoor groups have filters that trap mold spores, pollen, dust, and other micro particles. This functionality is done by an air filter, associated with an air conditioner.

In air conditioners, there are divisions –

• Cooling-tower and Chilled-water AC units,
• Split-system and Window AC units, and
• EER and BTU.

Famous Brands that produce Air Conditioners

Around the world, plenty of air conditioner manufacturers are available. Among them, the most famous and reputed manufacturers are Samsung, Panasonic, Harvest, LG, and BPL.

Some More Interesting Important Facts about Air Conditioners

Here’s some interesting calculation to give you a rough idea of how much power and electricity are consumed by air conditioners on a monthly basis.

4 mo. x 30 days/mo. x 6 hr/day = 720 hours

[(720 hrs x 200 watts) / (1000 watts/kW)] x $0.10/kWh = $14.40

If you want to purchase an air conditioning system, you should have a basic understanding of the following things:

• A basic air conditioning system executes three standard functions. The first thing is that it should provide required amount of cool air as required through a controlling knob. Reduction of air’s temperature is the basic operation of an air conditioning system. The cooling capacity of air conditioning system is measured as per the British Thermal Unit (BTU).

• Coming to the second characteristic, ability of removing moisture from the air is second important thing. An air conditioning system should filter humidity too, as sometimes excessive humidity causes health problems.

• At last, air filtering is the 3rd feature of an air conditioner. Filtration of air is done by an air filter, which filters lint and dust.

To understand how air conditioners work, take a look at this cool video clip: