So how bad is AC?
We have two tiny units to cool 25’000 sq ft and they do almost nothing (Obviously. A mere gesture on the part of managment to combat the 36’ heat INSIDE our office)
I’ve never had AC before, anywhere, and notice that the pipes coming out of the back seem WAY too hot, infact they seem to be radiating more heat than the machine outs cool in their trip to the window.
How bad is Air Conditioning for the environment?
From the heat standpoint, not any worse than any other machine. The A/C primarily moves heat from inside to outside, a relatively insignificant impact considering the volume of air in air conditioned buildings as a fraction of all air on earth. But inefficiency also causes it to generate waste heat. Cars, planes, and every other machine you can think of generates waste heat. I think that atmospheric issues are more important to the environment (e.g., global warming caused by greenhouse gases) than the production of actual heat at the surface (though I don’t know this for a fact and am open to authoritative correction on the matter).
I don’t quite parse your sentence
Is this A/C unit some kind of internal unit with pipes through the interior room space to the wall to exit the building? And you’re saying that the machine blows cool air, but it seems like it would be offset by the heat coming off the part of the pipes that is still inside the room? Sounds like kind of a strange arrangement to me.
Don’t think of it as you cooking the pretty ecosystem, think of it as… Returning the Sun’s life-giving warmth back to nature rather than hoarding it for your own selfish uses.
There are two reasons you’re A/C radiates heat. Firstly, it moves the heat that is inside your house to the outside. This has very little bearing on the environment except for maybe a plant that was placed directly in the venting area. The other source of the heat your A/C would be venting is from the consumption of electricity. When you have a machine doing something you can bet on there being energy bled off in ways other than the intended use of the machine. In your A/C it would be in the form of sound and heat; hopefully your A/C does not put out a lot of light. The heat is not really a big issue, as it is vented along with the rest of the heat.
If you really want to find out the price of A/C check how much power you use for it, and then look at the power station that generates it.
Don’t think of it as you cooking the pretty ecosystem, think of it as… Returning the Sun’s life-giving warmth back to nature rather than hoarding it for your own selfish uses.
There are two reasons your A/C radiates heat. Firstly, it moves the heat that is inside your house to the outside. This has very little bearing on the environment except for maybe a plant that was placed directly in the venting area. The other source of the heat your A/C would be venting is from the consumption of electricity. When you have a machine doing something you can bet on there being energy bled off in ways other than the intended use of the machine. In your A/C it would be in the form of sound and heat; hopefully your A/C does not put out a lot of light. The heat is not really a big issue, as it is vented along with the rest of the heat.
If you really want to find out the price of A/C check how much power you use for it, and then look at the power station that generates it.
A heat pump uses 1 Kwh of electricity to pump 1.2 Kwh of heat. (These are arbitrary numbers I am making up just for this example.) So the effect is that you pay for 1 Kwh of electricity, you remove 1.2 Kwh of heat from the house and you dump outside 2.2 Kwh.
Now, the heat pumped out makes absolutely no difference the the environment as it came from outside to begin with and would end up outside anyway.
The only thing that makes a difference is the heat which comes from the electricity used and that does not matter whether it came from running A/C or from any other appliance.