Is Your AC One Size Fits All?

Everybody runs into this problem...shopping for hats, "one size fits all" and your perfectly planned birthday gift is three sizes too large for the birthday boy...shopping for cars - "the seats are adjustable" but watching my 6'2 father trying to squeeze in can be quite entertaining - for me... (lol, not for him). Every now and then something seems to be one size fits all in some way or another, even in a society as diverse as we have become. EVEN Air Conditioners? Well. In a way, yes. Air Conditioners are pretty much the same across the board - they take humidity out of the air, and blow the warm air taken out of the house across tightly coiled refrigerant to cool it and then pump it back into the house. (If this interests you, there are TONS of pictures, explanations etc. included in the blog just check out: picture explaining air conditioning). So where does this different climate thing factor in? I mean safe to say quite different in southern California than let's say the South where it's humid. So our air conditioners are removing much needed humidity (or non-existent humidity) and the air conditioners down South don't do enough to take care of the humidity. Interesting, but I never would have really thought about it, that is until I came across this page. You can listen to the article or view a slide show at: http://glrc.org/story.php3?story_id=4219. (It only runs about 3 minutes and involves no reading, so why not?) The article focuses on John Proctor an inventor who is working on creating specialized systems of air conditioning for various different environmental areas.

That fact [that all air conditioners are made the same] inspired Proctor – with funding from the state of California – to design AC systems for three different climates – the hot dry west, the soggy southeast, and the more temperate Midwest. So that’s one model for Phoenix, another for Tampa, and a third for St. Louis. He built them in an attic workshop upstairs from his office.

So Air Conditioners are all made the same at the moment, but this might not always be thanks to innovative thinkers like John Proctor. If his new air conditioner could function more efficiently (without wasting energy removing humidity from the air that doesn't need to be removed) than Californians could save more money and energy when running their air. Hopefully, as time passes and energy accountability rises, we will have more inventions similar to this that will provide us an easy way to save money and energy.