Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: [Phys-l] cooling hints



At 1:07 AM -0500 8/24/11, John Clement wrote:

Obviously this is not true in the limit of turning it off for a long time
say a month.

It would not appear to be correct if you assume that the air conditioner has
a fixed efficiency for pumping thermal energy. Actually if you just turn up
the temperature the rate of heating is decreased as the temperature
differential between the inside and outside is decreased so the AC doesn't
have to work as hard and you save energy.

It is probably true that less energy is used by periodically "catching up" than in "keeping up."

But there are other considerations. In a humid climate, when the relative humidity gets above about 50-55%, mold spores, which are present pretty much everywhere, can start to grow and multiply, and can damage paper and cloth products (as I found out, much to my chagrin, when a couple of years ago, I had to throw away hundreds of books and years of accumulated journals that had been destroyed by mold damage in a damp basement). Keeping the air conditioning on, while it uses additional energy, does keep the relative humidity below the critical levels (unless there is a source of infusion of ground water, which was the case in my basement), and thus inhibits the growth of damaging molds.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
mailto:hugh@ieer.org
mailto:haskellh@verizon.net

It isn't easy being green.

--Kermit Lagrenouille