I was in Ace the other day and I saw a freestanding air conditioner. It resembled in size (and roughly in shape as I recall) one of those oil filled electric heaters that were being sold all over Chicago this past winter. I don’t know much about air conditioning, only my limited experience of putting them in my window and what HowItWorks tells me, but it seems to me that this thing cannot be much more than a glorified dehumidifier. Has anyone else seen it? Does anyone know if or how it works?
Thanks in advance,
Absimia
PS if you’re interested in getting it, it was a mere $800 :eek:
Portable air conditioners normally have an exhaust hose to be routed out of the area; this is usually not attached in the store model (assuming that it’s not running).
Without the hose, it can indeed be used as a dehumidifier, and some models have a floor-level condensate outlet for this purpose.
We can warm up a room by bringing in electricity and converting it to heat. But to cool down a room, we’d have to get the heat out of it. I don’t see how a self-contained unit could do that, so I share your scepticism. Can’t say I’ve heard of this before.
I’ve seen portable devices with a hose connected to the radiator. Stick the hose out the window and you can blow the heat out.
If you’re going to all that trouble I don’t know why one wouldn’t just get a window unit in the first place. (Though I suppose they’d be advantageous if you have an oddly shaped window.)
It didn’t occur to me that it might have a hose. That makes sense and I can’t think of how it would work any other way. It sort of takes away from the whole portable-ness of it, though.
I’ll probably take a better look at it next time I’m there, if only to satisfy curiosity.
As an aside, I just noticed, friedo, that we registered at the same time, but that you have way more posts than me. I feel like such a slacker. I better get cracking.
Good question… is a free-standing air conditioner even possible?
Conventional wisdom would say “no,” since an air conditioner simply pumps heat from point A to point B. Where would the heat in a free-standing air conditioner go?
But on further thought, I do not think the concept is impossible. Could the heat be stored internally as potential energy, i.e. could the heat be stored in a battery, flywheel, or material could undergo a phase change? Of course, there would be heat generated due to the conversion process, but if the overall rate of cooling is greater than the heat generated by the conversion process, I guess you really would have a “free-standing air conditioner.”
Those models indeed have a hose, which you can stick out of the window, or adapt on a sliding door (like one going to a patio). They are heavy, but less than the traditional window models, and nicer looking than them (and from outside almost invisible).
Yes. They are called portable air conditioners. They have a hose not much different than a plastic dryer vent hose. They are meant to be placed where a window mounted unit would be difficult to mount.
They do indeed cost more (approx double) and from what I understand not quite as good as their window mounted cousins.
I believe that I’ve seen freestanding models without a hose; the heat extracted from the room was pumped into water (also extracted from the room), so every few hours you had to empty out a container of near-boiling water.
A common misperception of window air conditioners is that they pump the hot air from the indoors through the air conditioner into the outdoors.
Not so.
A window air conditioner recycles the indoor air by moving it over the cooling elements and then throwing it back into the room. The hot air you feel coming out the back of an air conditioner is from the motor, not from the indoors.
Also it is possible to transfer the heat to water. That unit may have a hose inlet and outlet to get rid of the heat - I’ve never seen it in such a small unit though more like big central air units.
No, IIRC I think they were particularly ineffective (not to mention the safety factor of carting and tipping open vessels of scalding water); It was quite a while ago that I saw it.
We have one, a Daewoo 9000 BTU unit, 'cause it was cheaper than replacing the too-small windows in our 100+ yr. old house.
It’s about the size and shape of a 2 drawer file cabinet and we got it at Fry’s electronics for $499.00. It has an exhaust hose that fits into a plate that sits in the window, except that the plate didn’t fit any of our windows either, natch, so I made one out of plywood. It’s not terribly efficient, but it does work. It blows cool, if not cold, air, into the room, and there’s a lot of hot air coming out of the exhaust hose.
Incidentally, you can pay much more for them if you want to. The most expensive one they had at Fry’s was $1299.00, but I’ve seen them in catalogs for ~ $2000.00.
Anyway, to answer the OP, yes they do work, but not as well as a window mount model IMHO.
I could be wrong, but I see a few problems here. Heat could be stored, but ultimately would have to be removed/relocated, so there would have to be removable storage units of some sort. Plus I think the idea of the cooling being greater than the heat generated by conversion borders on perpetual motion.
The storage idea might work but would require frequent shutdowns to change out batteries or whatever.
This is just plain wrong. While the indoor air itself may be cooled and recirculated, the heat from the back of an air conditioner most certainly is the heat that has been removed from the indoor air. The following is from How Things Work :
I believe his main meaning is that it is not inside air which is correct. It is outside air which has been heated by the heat extracted from inside and by the work done by the compressor. His point was misleading, irrelevant and poorly worded but not “patently false”. Rather it was (and is) factually correct (if misleading, poorly worded etc)
