Air Conditioners

The Ultimate Chill

When it comes to sheer cooling power, nothing comes close to an air conditioner. The instant arctic blast of cool air they provide provides instant relief on the hottest days, meaning they’re growing in popularity as summer temperatures continue to rise.

How Do Air Conditioners Work?

If you have a very large or very hot room that you need to cool down, you need an aircon. To understand why this is, you first need to understand how air conditioners work.

Air conditioners take advantage of two simple rules. One is that whenever a liquid evaporates and turns into a gas, it loses some heat. The other rule is that compressed gas is much easier to turn back into a liquid. Air conditioners rely on these two things happening over and over again in a closed loop – they use a gas which is turned into a liquid and then back into a gas again.

The first step in air conditioning is when that baking summer air is sucked into the unit by a fan. This warm air travels over an ice-cold pipe that’s full of coolant. The coolant is an unstable liquid, which means it evaporates at relatively low temperatures. This instantly cools the air, which is then blown out into your room. You might think the process ends there, but that isn’t quite true!

When something cools down, it loses heat – but that heat doesn’t simply disappear. It has to go somewhere. In an air conditioner, the heat from the warm air is transferred into the coolant. This means the coolant is no longer cool! As it’s an unstable liquid, this means the coolant evaporates and turns into a gas. Your aircon system now contains a hot gas, which is no good for chilling air! This gas is pushed through a condenser and a compressor which turns it into a cooler liquid. The coolant is constantly cycled through the system like this, turning from a liquid to a gas and back into a liquid in an endless loop, sucking heat from the air and being cooled down again.

Remember Your Exhaust

When the coolant is fed through the compressor, it turns back into a liquid and loses heat. However, as we said above, that heat has to go somewhere! This is why every air conditioner is fitted with an exhaust, to vent out this excess heat. You’ll want this exhaust to lead outside (or at least out of the room) to vent all that heat away. If you’re using a portable aircon unit, remember that you’ll need to ensure you can stretch your exhaust duct out of a door or window.

For fitted models, this isn’t really a problem – the exhaust will be run through your wall as part of the installation process. However, it’s something to bear in mind when you’re thinking about where to position a portable model. The models usually come with an exhaust duct which you can stretch and bend, but be wary of stretching it too far. If the ducting gets ripped, it’ll make your air conditioner much less efficient. Place the unit as close to your open door or window as you can to ensure you can keep the ducting as short and straight as possible.

Works as a Dehumidifier

Air conditioners will also naturally dehumidify the air as part of the cooling process. This is because cold air doesn’t hold as much moisture as warm air. As the air conditioner works, it’ll vent warm, moist air out of its exhaust and blow cool, dry air into your room for a more refreshing breeze.

Ice-Cold Air Cooling for Businesses

As a result of the complex process described above, air conditioners will instantly chill the air. This means they can make almost any room comfortably cool much more quickly than a fan or an air cooler.

Do You Need an Air Conditioner?

Aircon units offer high-power cooling. They’re good for large, open spaces or very hot south-facing rooms. If you want to keep cool around the home or in a small office cubicle, though, you probably don’t need one! An air conditioner is a big investment, and you might find you get more value for money from a couple of fans or air coolers.

However, there are some situations where you absolutely do need an air conditioner. We’ll outline a few of them below!

Large Open-Plan Rooms

Open-plan rooms are growing more and more common, both in homes and workplaces. Offices, shops, and open-plan apartments are all too big for fans and air coolers, but a high-powered air conditioner will allow you to circulate a cool breeze around almost any size room.

Customer-Facing Businesses

First impressions are incredibly important to customer-facing businesses like shops and cafes. If your front-of-house area is hot and stuffy, this will put your customers off as soon as they step through your door. An air conditioner will provide an instant blast of refreshingly cool air, bringing the temperature down to a more comfortable level straight away.

Glass-Fronted Offices

Large glass windows are a fixture of most modern office buildings. This makes workplaces bright and gives you a nice view as you work, but they also tend to make offices stiflingly hot. While modern windows are often treated with a special film to reduce this problem, glass still lets around 25% of the sun’s heat through. On a hot day, this will get uncomfortable very quickly. An air conditioner is the only air cooling solution with enough power to circulate ice-cold air around a stifling room to bring the temperature down.

Very Hot Rooms

Rooms with heavy machinery or lots of computers can also get unbearably hot in summer. Server rooms, IT offices, kitchens, and warehouses are all full of electronic equipment and machinery, and all of it emits heat. An air conditioning unit will both cool air down and get it circulating around even the hottest room, preventing it from becoming stale and stuffy.

Aircon Maintenance

Air conditioners are made up of a lot of complex parts that all need to work together. They’re much more complex than fans or air coolers, meaning they do require a little more maintenance to keep them running smoothly. They contain filters which will need to be replaced occasionally to ensure the air they blow out stays clean. If it’s a portable unit, you should also check its exhaust duct to ensure no small rips have appeared.

Do I Need to Re-Gas My Aircon?

One thing you shouldn’t have to do, though, is re-gas your aircon. Many people believe they need to because their car air conditioner needs gassing every few years, but this isn’t the case. Car aircons are made with lightweight rubber tubes and either rubber or plastic seals which become less airtight over time. They’re also constantly affected by vibrations from the engine and bumps in the road. This means the coolant gas will gradually leak out and will need to be topped up every few years. Domestic air conditioners, on the other hand, usually use metal pipes and have more heavy-duty seals which don’t degrade with regular use.