Air conditioning is the process of making the indoor air cooler or warmer inside the home. This could mean raising the temperature, lowering it or removing humidity inside the rooms. Humidifiers work like air conditioners except their aim is to remove excess humidity without completely drying the air. Portable air conditioners are available in many models that aer measured by their ability to cool a particular sized room. You will often see air conditioners rated for rooms as large as 350 sq. ft. or 450 sq. ft. They energy rating of portable air conditioners is measure in BTU’s. Sometimes you may see it listed as a btu home portable air conditioner.
Home portable air conditioning units are used where spot cooling is required for larger rooms, they are used by some companies to cool computer systems. Also in industrial situations where certain machinery needs to be cooled constantly and the central air conditioning cannot double up as a cooler for this machinery.
Central air conditioning can be very effective but sometimes problems occur such as ‘hot spots’. This is a situation where you may will experience some cooler areas but other areas are of a different temperature. To rectify this problem sometimes it is neccesary to install air ducts to cool these hot spots. If ducts are not available for installation since portable units are very mobile they are often used. It is also possible to use split units to cool these spaces.
Portable cooling units do have one drawback which is heating. This is not surprising because air conditioning involves the process of absorbing the heat from the air and transferring it to the outside. This is done with the use of compressors and a refrigerant gas called Freon. The gas is pumped through a capillary tube under high pressure from the compressor. The pressure forces the molecules of the gas together and it becomes a semi liquid. This process of turning to a semi-liquid from a gas gives off a lot of heat.
This semi-liquid then flows into an evaporation unit called evaporator coils made of metal where the gas immediately evaporates and becomes a gas again. It cannot evaporate without heat, which it absorbs from the metal coils, the process of evaporation cools the surface from where heat is transferred to the liquid to make it a gas. Since the coils lose heat to turn the semi-liquid to a gas the coils cool very fast.
When air is blown over the cold coils the air cools too and this air is blown into the room which cools in turn. However, when the gas is pumped back through the capillary tube the heat it absorbs from the coils has to be given off again for the gas to become a semi-liquid.
This is the heat we feel behind any portable air conditioning unit. Many portable air conditioning units have successfully developed a vent system that consists of a blower and a tube that is attached to the rear of the unit and allows the hot air from the unit to be transferred to the outside without heating the space being cooled with the portable air conditioning unit. Portable air conditioning units have many uses but are not perfect for every situation.