More Heat

Yesterday afternoon my sister asked me to accompany her to the computer shop where she wanted to buy a replacement desktop pc.  She confessed she didn’t know much about computers and wanted my advice/support.  I think I probably confused her with the options rather than the planned assistance.  Nevertheless she did buy a pc and then asked me to help her set it up at her home.  She and her husband are in the middle of installing a new kitchen and with several large holes in walls were windows will eventually go there was not point in them running their aircon.  After an hour the sweat was pouring off me! 

At 5pm we stopped for the day and I returned home to find Jan sweltering.  The evaporative aircon had been unable to cope with the conditions.  This type of aircon doesn’t work very well in humid conditions and consequentially was only pushing out warm humid air.  My initial thought was the water pump in the rooftop aircon had failed but after climbing onto the roof I established the unit was working correctly.

When my father died my mother was not capable of cutting firewood or operating the log stove and so a reverse cycle aircon was installed.  This kept her warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

I’ve always believed an evaporative aircon uses less electricity than a refrigerated reverse cycle unit.  The evaporative system only consists of a small water pump and a large fan whereas the reverse cycle requires a compressor.

You might recall I fitted an energy monitoring and recording sensor when we moved into the house and today I ran both systems to see how much electricity each used.  The evaporative system uses 1.03 – 1.34kWh

Whereas the reverse cycle unit uses 2-2.8kWh.  It might appear the reverse cycle unit is more expensive, however it will turn on and off to maintain the desired temperature.  The older evaporative system doesn’t have a thermostat control and runs continuously.  so the energy usage gap between them may not be a great as initially presumed.

Of course if we had solar panels on the roof we wouldn’t care how much electricity was being used!

Oh…. and it’s going to be another hot day tomorrow