Air Conditioners are a pain point for most people in our country who are concerned about their electricity bills. The moment an air conditioner is added to the list of appliances used in a household, the electricity bills increase significantly. Although it is difficult to significantly reduce the “big” impact of an air conditioner on your electricity bills, but still some of it can be managed by choosing the right technology, doing the right installation/maintenance/operation and by doing the right insulation of the room where the air conditioner is used (more details in our articles listed at the end of this article). When it comes to technology, there were not many available till sometime back. When BEE actively started analyzing and labeling the air conditioners, we got some good one in form of 5 star air conditioners. The latest and the most efficient technology that is available in market today is the Inverter Technology for air conditioners. Inverter technology is designed in such a way that it can save 30-50% of electricity (units consumed) over a regular air conditioner.

In fact air conditioner during cooling process, takes the indoor air, cools it by passing it through evaporator and throws it back in the room. But air conditioners just work on internal air. no power to my ac unitAlong with evaporator air conditioner also has a compressor that compresses the gas (refrigerant) in the AC to cool it that in turn cools the incoming internal air from the room.cost of central air unit for mobile home The compressor is either off or on. ac unit for a small roomWhen it is on, it works at full capacity and consumes full electricity it is designed to consume. When the thermostat reaches the temperature level set in the AC, the compressor stops and the fan (in AC) continues to operate. When the thermostat senses that the temperature has increased, the compressor starts again.

The inverter technology works like an accelerator in a car. When compressor needs more power, it gives it more power. When it needs less power, it gives less power. With this technology, the compressor is always on, but draws less power or more power depending on the temperature of the incoming air and the level set in the thermostat. The speed and power of the compressor is adjusted appropriately. This technology was developed in Japan and is being used there successfully for air conditioners and refrigerators. This technology is currently available only in split air conditioners. Every air conditioner is designed for a maximum peak load. So a 1.5ton AC is designed for a certain size of room and 1 ton for a different size. But not all rooms are of same size. A regular air conditioner of 1.5ton capacity will always run at peak power requirement when the compressor is running. An air conditioner with inverter technology will run continuously but will draw only that much power that is required to keep the temperature stable at the level desired.

So it kind of automatically adjusts its capacity based on the requirement of the room it is cooling. Thus drawing much less power and consuming lesser units of electricity. Although air conditioner with Inverter Technology adjusts its capacity based on the room requirement, it is very important to install a right sized air conditioner in a room. Please make sure that you evaluate the room and air conditioner capacity before you make a purchase. Keep watching for this space as we are in process of creating a comparator for electricity savings in various air conditioners. Several people have concerns that Inverter Technology air conditioners do not cool well or cool slowly. However let us take this image as reference to understand how inverter AC works: Non inverter ACs are fixed speed ACs, where as inverter ACs are variable speed ACs. Non inverter ACs have compressors that go “On” and “Off”. Whereas inverter ACs have compressors that are “On” all the time. As non inverter ACs are sized for peak summer heat load, they are over-sized all the other times (in fact most of the time people oversize even for peak summer season).

The drawback of the same is that the AC “Over cools” most of the time. So if you set AC at temperature of 25, it will cool it down to 23 or 22. Now one would question: then what is the use of thermostat? Well the thermostat (in a non inverter AC) switches off the compressor when the outside temperature has reached 25. But a lot has happened before that. In an AC, refrigerant moves from liquid to gas (by taking heat from the room) and then back from gas to liquid as the compressor compresses it. But if the refrigerant is more and heat in the room is less (which happens in over sized AC), it does not get enough heat from the room to convert from liquid to gas and it keeps moving as liquid. Now when the thermostat detects temperature and switches off the compressor, the refrigerant still remains in liquid state and thus has capacity to take heat from room to convert to gas. And so it takes more heat from the room and cools the room below the set temperature. In comparison, the inverter tech AC changes the flow rate of refrigerant based on the heat of the room.

When heat is less, the flow rate is less, when heat is more, the flow rate is more. And it does not switch off the compressor ever. It just makes sure that if temperature setting is 25, it is maintained at that level. So the difference is: non inverter AC would over cool as shown in the picture. Whereas inverter AC will cool optimum. And thus one may feel that inverter AC does not cool or is slow. Free 2nd opinion on equipment replacement and get $250 off a complete system. Follow Us View on Facebook SEER Ratings – What Do They Mean? Here we will discuss how by knowing what type of SEER unit to buy, will help make your decision on a new air conditioning unit much easier and could possibly save you money in the long run. What does SEER stand for? The word SEER is an acronym for Season Energy Efficiency Ratio. What is a SEER rating? The SEER rating of an air conditioning unit is the cooling output during a typical cooling season divided by the total electric energy input during the same period.

SEER is simply a formula that is described by the outcome of the following: Divide the system’s rated BTU’s (what ton the unit is, ex: 5 ton), by it’s stated SEER rating to determine how many watts it consumes per hour. Why is knowing this information important? This is one of the most frequently asked questions by a customer when they are deciding on what type of SEER air conditioning unit they should buy. There are numerous reasons why the customer should know what kind of SEER unit they need to buy. One of the main reasons a customer needs to concern themselves with is the operating cost annually of the unit. Everyone is always looking to save money and as a homeowner, you should know that the main source of your electric bill is your air conditioning unit; so why wouldn’t you want to save the most money possible right? Here in the next section, I’ll teach you the annual cost of different types of SEER units, so you can determine which unit best fits your budget.

In this section, I will teach you how to find the annual cost of a hypothetical air conditioning unit. The information we need to get started will be the size and SEER of the current air conditioning unit. For this example, we will use a 5 ton, 15 seer unit. First, 1 Ton is the equivalent to 12,000 BTU’s (British Thermal Unit). So what we will do is take12,000 BTU’s and multiply that by 5 (that’s what Ton our unit is) and we will get 60,000 BTU’stotal. Now that we have the total number of BTU’s for our 5 ton unit, we will take 60,000 and divide that by 15 (that’s the SEER rating of our unit), you can find the information on what ton and SEER rating your air conditioning system is, by going outside and looking at the nameplate on your air conditioning unit. Digressing back to our formula, we will take 60,000 BTU’s and divide that by 15to get 4,000. The value 4,000 represents the number of Watts our air conditioning unit uses per hour of operation. Second, we need to convert our Watts into KWH (Kilo Watts per Hour).

The reason we need to do this is so that we can determine how many KWH our air conditioner uses per hour. By taking a look at your energy bill, you will see you are billed by KWH and not Watts. Going back to our equation, we will take 4,000 and divide that by 1,000 (1 Kilowatt = 1,000 Watts) and we will get 4. The number 4 represents the number of KWH our AC unit uses per hour of operation., the average Houstonian uses 1,262 kwh a month and15,144 kwh yearly. Click Here for charts and graphs of this data. For the sake of arguments and keeping things simple, let’s just say the average person in Houston uses their AC unit 8 hours a day. 8 hours multiplied by 30 (I just used an average of 30 days in a single month) and we get 240 hours used in a single month. Next, we will take the 240 hours we just received and multiply that by 12 (the number of months in a year) and we get 2,880. This new number (2,880) represents the number of operation hours our hypothetical AC unit uses annually.

Finally, we will take 2,880 and multiply that by 4 (remember this number? It was the number of KWH our air conditioning unit uses per hour of operation) and we will get 11,520 kwh. This new number (11,520) represents the number of KWH our air conditioning system uses annually. Lastly, now that we have the number of kwh our AC unit uses annually (11,520), we will take that number and multiply it by the dollar amount our energy companies charge us per kwh. For the sake of keeping things simple once again, we will just say our energy company charges us 10 cents per kwh. So, we will take 11,520  and multiply that by 10 cents and we will get 1,152 or in other words,$1,152.00 annually for the cost of operation for a 5 ton 15 SEER unit. Now remember, this is all hypothetical. I just wanted to give you a foundation and a platform to work with. Now you can take all this information here and input your own data and see how this applies to you. Below are some charts displaying how different SEER units can save you money and energy.