Air conditioning?

[AdamW]

Anyone been abroad to a hot(ter) country and stayed in a class joint when they were there?

When I went to the US we had central air-conditioning in our apartment. My uncle and aunt have it and they live in Canada where it barely gets above freezing! Even some questionnable hotels I have visited in Rome had air-conditioning in the rooms.

So, does anyone here (if not UK, specify where) have an airconditioned/comfort cooled house? Do you have a central a-c system, or a portable unit that you set up in the living room in summer? What are the running costs like?

I am predicting that anyone with central a/c who responds is living in a swanky city pad!

 

[salem2000]

At the moment we have a portable unit (not easy to carry up stairs though) purchased from B&Q for £200 in their sales. It works ok, but you need to empty the water container at least once a day. In a room approx 20ft X 13ft it works well and is great on really hot days. The bigest drawback is the vent hose, which has to go to the outside.

Am thinking of a fixed unit for the bedrooms, and am waiting for details from:

Here

These items can be DIY fitted

 

[kendor]

same as above but got mine at Homebase and it works really well, have vented it out through wall, one thing i'm surprised of is that you have to empty the reservoir every day? even through the hot summer last year when it was very humid outside i only emptied out mine twice.

 

[AdamW]

So, it seems there are a few people with "portable" air-conditioners, but no-one here has a central air-con system.

That probably isn't surprising, as the properties most likely to have such a luxury would be luxury flats in the posher parts of London. And if you own one of those, DIY isn't really on the cards as they have strict tenancy agreements. So they probably won't be here, reading this!

Perhaps I should start a trend, however I can't justify it with my current property. Give me a few years!

 

[kendor]

Strictly speaking the portable "air con" units do not give proper "air conditioning" they are merely chillers or coolers. True Air Conditioning will monitor and adjust the relative Humidity aswell as the temperature, this can be achieved by the use of an internal device called a kettle which as the name suggests contains an element which heats up water that is then passed as steam into the air, this is controlled carefully by humidistat sensors, so if the air con is being called to chill, the kettle will produce steam to balance the effect of chilling causing the moisture in the air from dropping (reason your throat feels dry when it is cold)

 

[AdamW]

I believe the term is "comfort cooler", these just cool the air and have little or no effect on humidity (this is used in relatively cheap chilled-water type systems, just blows air over chilled radiators in the room being cooled). Air Conditioning dehumidifies the air as well and this is one of the benefits of it as you feel cooler in dry air of the same temperature (which is why humidity makes you feel so bad). I didn't realise the systems could increase humidity as well, everyone I know who wears contact lenses moans about their eyes feeling dry in air-conditioned air.

It's terrible, I used to push a broom around the local tip all summer long and I was fine in the heat... the aircon was off in my office for a few weeks as they replaced the cooling units and re-commissioned the system, I was sweating like Garry Glitter in a playground.

 

[kendor]

I believe the term is "comfort cooler", these just cool the air and have little or no effect on humidity (this is used in relatively cheap chilled-water type systems,

when i was talking of chillers i was referring to refrigerant based units not the water evaporation units.

 

[AdamW]

The comfort cooling systems I was thinking of chill water in the cooling plant, then pump it round heavily insulated pipes. At the ceiling vents or wall units, air is blown over a heat exchanger through which the chilled water flows.

We have this type of system in my office and it's pants... I was so hot at my desk last week I called maintenance. The guy who came to adjust the airflow said they are due for a system balance (where they get all the vents running about the same)... When I said "I suppose that's because some people are freezing under the vents" I swear a little puddle formed underneath him. Through the tears of laughter he told me that there is little risk of anyone ever getting too cold from a comfort-cooling system!

Those evaporative ones: you can buy little desk-fan versions of them! Great stuff.

 

[kendor]

if it is chilled water then it does sound like you have cooling towers on the roof so i'd be weary as i've worked at many places where they had taken a very blaise attitude to proper dosing thinking they will not get caught out, until another breakout and it appears on the news and in the papers.
there should be regular visits by a specialist to check the correct levels of chemicals and whether there are any problems, i've found a lot of dosing pumps badly maintained and covered in limescale or corrosion and sticking or not working at all!

 

[AdamW]

I am glad to say that my company is hot on maintenance and the like: everything is kept good as new... obviously whoever decides the budgets understands that you can't expect to skimp on these things.

In fact they have just replaced all the cooling units on the roof and overhauled the cooling system so we should be pretty safe against SARS and Legionnaires' for a while

 

[AL]

Salem, let us know how you get on with your fixed unit especially how noisey it is. I too have a B&Q portable air con unit, which cools the room down nicely but is very noisey in the process. Ideally i'd love to have a fixed unit which i could leave on over night without keeping myself or my neighhbours awake