For a Comfortable Home Life Heating and Cooling › Free Standing Air Conditioners When you can't afford to have a house-wide AC system installed in your home, a cheaper alternative is a free standing, portable air conditioner unit that you can move from room to room as you need it. This is a popular option for people on tighter budgets that still need some form of powerful cooling during very hot summers. Some models are very powerful yet are relatively compact, so can be used in different areas of the home for best effect. So let's take a look at what these devices are, how they work and what the cost in terms of energy consumption. What is a Portable Air Conditioning Unit? This is a smaller version of the fixed AC that you see installed in homes and offices. Instead of it needing to be permanently connected to an outside wall through which it is vented via an external pumping unit, a portable unit is moveable (on wheels) making it much more versatile. These movable appliances are generally more compact than their fixed counterparts and depending upon output rating, tend to use less energy.

However, if this kind of unit is used in a larger room on the high setting for a long period of time it will still consume a lot of costly energy. The major problem people come up against when they first take delivery of their first free standing AC machine is what to do with the length of corrugated plastic pipe that the instructions say must be connected to the back of the unit. This is the exhaust venting duct and it must be placed through an opening in an external wall of the building. The reason for this is all air conditioning devices generate hot air as a by-product of the heat exchange process they use to produce the cold air that cools us down. That hot air must be vented outside. Failure to do so will result in the appliance creating more hot air than cold and you ending up with a net temperature increase in the room it's being used in! How Does a Free Standing AC Work? The principle is the same as a fixed AC unit, although all of the process goes on inside a single unit instead of the split units used by a fixed AC.

To get an idea of how this works, let's look first at a fixed unit. With a fixed installation, the in-room unit produces cold air by passing room temperature air through a refrigeration process similar to the way your domestic fridge works. There is a compressor that forces air through a heat exchange where a refrigerant gas chills it and a fan pushed the chilled air into the room. The heat exchange process does what it sounds like it does, which is to create both hot and cold air from the intake. The hot air is channelled through an exhaust duct which is connected to the outside unit where fans draw the heat out into the atmosphere. As the appliance cools the air inside the room and draws off heat it also acts as a dehumidifier, taking moisture out of the air in the room. This is desirable in areas of high humidity where the heat can be more draining and make you feel more tired. How Does a Portable Vent Hot Air? Our portable device works along the same lines with the difference being it is not connected to an outside unit to draw the hot air away.

In its place, it has a movable vent that you can either fix to a suitable opening in an external wall such as a fan outlet, or do what most owners do and hang it out a nearby window. Most portables come with window venting kits which provide you with a way to block the gap in the window that is created by having it open to pass the exhaust vent through. best free standing ac unitsThese work best on windows that open by sliding one pane of glass over another, but not so well on windows that open in- or out-wards like a door (there is a gap top and bottom which is not so easy to plug).gree split air conditioner customer service Many people in this situation find something to stuff into the gaps to keep the heat on the outside and the cool on the inside. ac unit not reaching set temperature

anything that will fill the gaps can be used. It may not look so great, but at least you'll be nice and cool! All this processing consumes a considerable amount of energy, with many compact units using more than two kilowatts of electricity to keep you and the room you are occupying nice and cool. The old saying "You don't get something for nothing" springs to mind here. If you want to be cool no matter how hot it gets outside and no matter what he weather or humidity levels, a good quality compact air conditioner will do it for you as long as you're prepared for the cost of higher electricity bills. Running a 2kW appliance all day and probably most of the night as well will soon rack up a sizeable quarterly bill. Is There a Cheaper Alternative to AC? There is a cheaper-to-run alternative that will keep you cool during the hot summer, but it will only work if you live in an area that has relatively dry heat (low humidity). That alternative is called an evaporative cooler (sometimes referred to as a swamp cooler) and it works on the principle of cooling by evaporation of moisture.

This type of appliance has little more than a fan and maybe an internal water pump to consume electricity and therefore uses around 1/20th the amount of energy as an AC of similar output. Another major advantage is there is no need to vent any air to the outside as no hot air is produced. This means there is no unsightly vent hose to worry about. You can read more about what are often referred to as portable air conditioners vent free by visiting the site via that link as they make fascinating reading. If it weren't for their lack of effectiveness in humid atmospheres, they would be the perfect replacement for air conditioning units large and small.Summer is here and the air is full of the the sound of whining air conditioners, all seriously sucking kilowatts. Yet much of that air conditioning load could be reduced or the air conditioning season shortened if we did simple things, many of them common before air conditioning was common in North America. Here are some low-tech tips for keeping cool.

The best ideas are those that keep the heat out of your home in the first place, rather than paying to pump it out after it gets in.According to the Washington Post, The Department of Energy estimates that awnings can reduce solar heat gain—the amount temperature rises because of sunshine—by as much as 65 percent on windows with southern exposures and 77 percent on those with western exposures. Your furniture will last longer, too.Awnings can translate into a saving of cooling energy of 26 percent in hot climates, and 33 percent in more temperate climates where it might even make air conditioning unnecessary. It will certainly cut the loads.More: Awnings: Time to Bring Them BackNice Shades On New York's Learning Spring SchoolI don't own an air conditioner. The house immediately to the south does it for us, completely shading the south side of our house. What it misses, a huge ancient maple in its front yard gets, so in winter I get a lot of sun in my window, and in summer I am always in shade.

A tree is as sophisticated as any electronic device around; it lets the sun through in winter and grows leaves in summer to block it.Geoffrey Donovan studied it in Sacramento, and calculated the savings."Everyone knows that shade trees cool a house. No one is going to get a Nobel Prize for that conclusion," says the study co-author, Geoffrey Donovan. "But this study gets at the details: Where should a tree be placed to get the most benefits? And how exactly do shade trees impact our carbon footprint?" Key findings:Frank Lloyd Wright once said "a doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines." It turns out he could have been a mechanical engineer, for it is surprising how effective vines are at keeping a house cool. With the new weatherization grants, the salesmen are out peddling ground source heat pumps to keep you cool for less, but really, free is better.Vines such as ivy, Russian vine and Virginiairginia creeper grow quickly and have an immediate effect;

Many complain that vines can ruin buildings, dig out mortar or cause wood to deteriorate, but it depends on the vines and the building.Climbers can dramatically reduce the maximum temperatures of a building by shading walls from the sun, the daily temperature fluctuation being reduced by as much as 50%.Together with the insulation effect, temperature fluctuations at the wall surface can be reduced from between –10°/14°F to 60°C/140°F to between 5°C/41°F and 30°/86°F. Vines also cool your home through envirotranspiration, described in our post Be Cool and Plant A Tree.The windows on your home are not just holes in the wall that you open or close, they are actually part of a sophisticated ventilation machine. It is another "Oldway"—People used to take it for granted that you tune them for the best ventilation, but in this thermostat age we seem to have forgotten how.For instance, everyone knows that heat rises, so if you have high windows and open them when it hot inside, the hot air will vent out.

But it can be a lot more sophisticated than that. When air passes over your home, it works the same way as it does over an airplane wing: the Bernoulli effect causes the air on top and on the downwind side of the house to be at a lower pressure than on the upwind side. So if you have double hung windows, you can open the bottom section of the upwind side of the house and the upper section of the downwind side, and the low pressure will suck the air through your house. Make the outlet openings larger than the inlet opening, it increases the draft. That is why I love double hung windows; they offer the most flexibility and options. Others say that casement windows are best because they can open up to 100%; double hungs can never be open more than 50%. However I have seen studies (which I cannot find) that show that double hung windows actually work better because of the many options in setting them.It doesn't have to be like Collin's Batman fan; they come in all kinds of designs and work on the same principle, that moving air evaporates moisture from your skin and keeps you cooler.

Collin notes that using them is one of our 25 Ways to Save the Planet, and they can save you some cash since they operate at a fraction of central and window air-conditioning units (and they can work great in tandem with your A/C if global warming has you sweating it out). As Energy Star reminds us, ceiling fans help keep you cool, rather than cooling the entire room. So there is no point in leaving them on if you leave the room; that's why expert Carl Seville says " Ceiling fans are evil"Kristen writes: In much the same way that more ice/snow reflects UV rays instead of absorbing the heat the way the oceans do (think: feedback loop that results from melting polar ice caps), cities are now giving white roofs a second look as a way to cool cities and fight climate change. The Los Angeles Times reports that the Climate Change Research Conference, held this week, advised that if buildings and road surfaces in 100 of the largest cities in the US were covered with lighter and heat-reflective surfaces the savings could be massive.

Lighter Roofs Could Save $1Billion USD AnnuallyHow To Help Prevent Global Warming On Your RoofWhite Roofs to Sweep the World, Fight Climate ChangeThe best way to deal with unwanted solar gain is to keep it out in the first place. One can do that with properly designed overhangs or bris soleil, which keep out the sun in summer but are designed to let it in during winter. However this is not very flexible. Another option is the exterior blind, quite common in Europe or Australia but expensive and hard to find in North America, where upfront cost always loses out to operating cost. External Blinds Keep Out the HeatShutters really are the most amazing overlooked technology. They provide ventilation, security, shading and storm protection in one simple device. Building the Green Modern Home: Looking at WindowsA lot of people run expensive air conditioning when it is actually pretty cool out- after the sun has been baking a California house all day it can be cool in the evening but the house is still holding a couple of hundred thousand BTUs of heat.

In more temperate parts of the country, just moving the air and having good ventilation could eliminate the need for AC much of the time.Airscape Fan Takes A Load off the Air ConditionerWWOO/Promo imageCulinary Historians of OntarioThere is a reason our ancestors built summer kitchens; those stoves put out a lot of heat and you didn't want them in your house in summer. Outside summer kitchens are all the rage in the luxury house/ mcmansion set as well. It really makes no sense to run a stove inside, just to then spend money to run air conditioning to remove the heat again. So get a gas barbecue and grill your vegetables, take advantage of farmers markets to get fresh stuff, and eat lots of salad.More: A Moveable Feast: We Like Ike's Partio Portable Kitchen and BarbequeSummer Kitchens Make A Comeback In Stylefrom the Florida Solar Energy Center says it all. When the weatherization contractors come to get you to insulate your house, (the most expensive thing you can do to save energy) you can show them that this makes no sense, only 7% of the cooling load is coming through the walls.