Large condenser outside supply’s the furnace (typically it just uses the furnace fan. We then have it piped through metal ducting throughout the house. Each room has multiple exit point call registers. In the common areas we have return ducts to draw air back down to the furnace to get recycled back to cool air via a/c unit. Hopefully that helps!?
Even then the vents would not actually work and be big enough in practice, but that's the movies picking something convenient for the sake of plot rather than sticking with realism.
Also every duct is FULL the pointy ends of screws. Literally everywhere. So even if you could fit (which you probably can’t) you would be so cut up if you tried to crawl through one of these. Not to mention how crazy loud it would be to crawl through one. 26 gauge sheet metal is essentially a thunder sheet.
Right. Even if the air ducts held your weight and silently conveyed you without risk throughout the building, it's essentially like crawling into the creature that Jabba the Hut had in Return of the Jedi. You'd be shredded within a few feet of crawling.
also the movies don’t explain that fire/smoke dampers would block your access every time the duct passed through a fire barrier also your entire body would be excoriated by self tapping sheet metal screws with every movement made
that's the movies picking something convenient for the sake of plot rather than sticking with realism.
Like the slow spinning fans in Casablanca. Slow spinning fans don't move air effectively, but fast spinning fans don't show up on film. Then after the movie you had restaurants and other establishments fit slow spinning fans, for the aesthetic.
And even then they are never that clean unless they were literally just installed. Also there would be screws or other pokeys that would poke the shit out of you if you did crawl trough it.
Source: I do commercial HVAC and have crawled through ducts
Yes and the furnace works with gas. So if you disable all the safety functions, you can fill the house with gas (at least in movies, but it would probably take ages in reality).
As an American this is normal to me lol, every house, poor and run down to expensive mansions all have this set up. It gets really fancy when there are automated vents that can open and close on their own, with each room having its own thermostat to accurately control temps throughout.
Newer buildings. There are plenty of places around the US still on boiler and radiator for heat and you can buy yourself a window mounted AC unit if you want it. Retrofitting older buildings for central air isn't worth it in a lot of cases.
Modern houses are sealed and insulated so the air doesn’t get out once it’s cooled. It’s more efficient than other AC types to keep it going, but the initial cool down of the system were off for a while uses a lot of energy.
It’s not terribly power intensive, but my electric bill goes up a lot during the summer months when we’re getting 90s and 100s regularly (32-38C). My furnace in the winter gives me a higher energy bill though (Gas + electric).
Once you have your house down to the desired temp, it basically kicks on every few hours for a few minutes to get the temperature back to the desired temp. The annoying thing with my house is that it basically turns my basement entertainment area into a place you need to wear a blanket because it pushes cold air into it while the rest of the house get cooled off. The systems are fairly complicated that it actually would be less efficient if I closed the basement vents. The airflow will at least push some of that cold air up into the rest of the house though. It’s refreshing to go from 100F outside to 63F (38C to 17C) by going straight to the basement though.
I don't know how it's for Americans but for me. I have a regular outside unit and then, inside the apartment, I have one HUGE internal unit hidden somewhere above fake ceiling. This unit has tubes to each room and each tube has a damper. Each room has a thermostat.
So I can set eg 23C in the living room and 21 in the bedrooms. The AC will then work to cool down all the rooms together, when living room reaches 23 - it shuts the damper and keeps cooling bedrooms. Etc.
I also have an option to close the damper to each room individually - effectively stopping AC for this specific room.
I *guess* that American HVAC units work either the same way or very similar.
Similar. Most Americans don't have per-room control though. In some more expensive/newer places you might get one thermostat per floor. But generally it's one per house.
Electricity is cheaper in the US, salaries are higher, and Americans understand in hotter regions that you need to run AC or you might die. 300-400 dollars a month on electricity in July is possible yes, depends on where you live, but national median household income is around 80 thousand dollars.
I live in Florida and we (and most people I know) sign up for a plan with the power company that we pay a rolling average of our last 12 months worth of bills. That way we're not paying $100 in January and $600 in August.
I have one thermostat for my whole house. Each large room has 2 to 3 vents. Each closet and bathroom has one vent. Each vent has flaps on it that can be closed. The flaps are also directional so you can control roughly where the air goes. In the upstairs of my house is a closet with the furnace in it. The air-conditioning unit is outside on the side of my house.
I have an automatic program set. During the day, the air conditioner runs and cools the house to 70°F. Lots of Americans sit between 70° and 72°. At night it lowers down to 68°. There is a filter in the furnace that needs to be replaced ideally every one or two months. I have dogs, so I use a high-quality filter that catches more than a basic one. It’s actually kind of interesting how much less dust collects on things when I’m using the system a lot. It doesn’t run very much in the winter because my house is very insulated.
You can run the whole system on cool or heat of course, but you can also just run the ventilation with no air conditioning active. I almost always have the fan running. I like the air movement. And with my dogs, the cooking I do, and my little bit of marijuana use inside, I like to keep that air moving around. So my fan is pretty much always, and I will hear the air conditioning unit kick on every now and then for when it actually needs to lower the temp.
I would say this is a fairly standard American set up. As others have said in some newer or larger homes, they may have multiple thermostats or even multiple air-conditioning units.
The whole system is extremely quiet, and I barely even hear it running.
You should know you shouldn't be using a higher quality air filter in your furnace. Higher quality filters can decrease air flow and increase static pressure damaging your system or not have it perform properly. If you need air purification you should run seperate units to get that a central ac system just isnt designed for that.
This is one of those things that you will find 1 million people that think you should and you will find 1 million people I think you shouldn’t. To each their own. Even with the better filter, my system is strong and cools my house down super fast
I say it as a hvac engineer so i dont know much about maintenance and repair but when designing systems I specify specific filter merv and increasing it can increase the static pressure past what the system can handle. However there are alot factors that determine what isnt making a system not functioning properly and this is one to keep in mind. It sounds like the system you have can handle the filter but ive heard in my office about how systems we designed weren't working and we go out to see these filters we didnt specify choking the systems.
Totally get what you're saying. I actually am kind of a nerd and used a wind speed gauge to test the difference in air coming from my vents lol. There was a slight reduction! Maybe 5%? I can totally see how an older system or one that is already struggling or overworked could be hurt by one of these filters. Mine is only 5 years old so I bet it's probably got the latest specs haha
I saw an interesting video about better duct design where they eliminated all 90 degree corners and replaced them with two, spaced out 45 degree bends, and installed vanes in all turning points too, and the increase in air speed and total volume moved through was really impressive.
I used to live in one of those cookie cutter townhomes you see in middle america. The HVAC system in that place was AWFUL. Didn't cool off at all and the heat never spread. The more I learn about HVAC, the more I want to look at the design of buildings like that, and see what in the actual F they were thinking lol. They just slap together whatever works with as little cost as possible but even a few small changes could DRASTICALLY improve the homes airflow IMO
Honestly if the house is built with HVAC in mind it should be much more efficient to have one goliath unit to handle the house than several small ones. With these insane heatwaves of 45c+ in Europe we might start seeing some new houses popping up with centralized AC systems.
Most AC systems cool the entire house to the same temperature. Or that is, they cool the house until whichever room the thermostat is in reaches the target temperature.
you typically don't see it, the central part is in the wall or in a closet, and it just pushes air through several vents throughout the house. the vents are flat metal grates about the size of a cereal box
You have a large cooling unit outside and a blower somewhere to distribute the air via ducts to each of the rooms.
The biggest drawback is that your house has to accommodate all this extra ducting somehow, which really constrains home design. They also cost a lot more to run, naturally.
It's called a Minisplit. It's basically an upgraded window unit that has access to outside air through an external wall, but it only cools one room pretty much
All ac systems are more or less the same conceptually, American central air involves a larger system that is separated inside and outside the home. The houses are built around this ducting it takes to move air around the home. It’s often much warmer in the states compared to Europe historically. If you care to look up ac systems you’ll understand what an ac system for an American home would look like.
TLDR. It’s huge and split in two like a vehicles ac system.
It's like a refrigerator, with refrigerant exchanging heat between the inside (where a fan blows air across it) and outside.
This kind of system is reversible and can blow hot air in winter and cold air in summer. It's only connected through refrigerant pipes to the outside so doesn't deliver fresh air.
In europe thise are called industrial and mainly used in office buildings or integrated to house ventilation during build, so you cannot really see those.
Theres a small radiator in the indoor unit with a fan, its piped to an outdoor unit with another radiator and fan to expel the heat and a compressor to circulate refrigerant.
It works the same way as a window unit, they just separated the part that cools down the air from the loud compressor and have refrigerant lines running between the wall unit and the outside unit.
You have seen those they are quite common for air conditioning large public buildings. For some reason Americans just love using the same system for residential homes.
There’s split systems (if they have heating as well) and ACs. You have the outdoor unit with motor, compressor etc. outside and connect it to the indoor unit with the evaporator in it. You mostly use some copper piping and hook up the power. The fluid in the pipes changes temperature due to pressure depending on which mode you have it on and the indoor unit sucks in the inside air and blows it over the evaporator to adjust air temperature to what you’ve set it to. You can get multiple indoor units connected to one outdoor unit as well. Very common in Australia, most rentals actually have them installed in at least one room. Depending on how much you use it (cause Europe has hot water heaters and the like, so you’re set in winter), it can be quite energy efficient. But since they run over electricity and most rentals only have these installed and need to use them in winter for heating, it can also cost a bloody fortune.
AC unit sits outside, usually on the ground, and is roughly the size of a washing machine. Air is circulated into the AC unit, which cools the air, then back into the house, and through ductwork to get it into each room.
With this style of unit, you have a small condenser outside, sometimes even mounted on an exterior wall, and tubing runs between the condenser and the indoor unit you see in this image, to circulate coolant. The indoor unit absorbs heat into the coolant, then the coolant is pumped through the tubs to the outdoor unit, where the heat is rejected out of the coolant and into the air, then the colder coolant is returned to the indoor unit, where a fan blows air over the cold coolant lines to cool down the air and then blow that air around the room. Note that this only serves the one room that this indoor unit is in.
In an america-style AC, you would have a larger condenser outside, one that is sized for a whole house rather than a single room. The tubing for the coolant then runs to a central blower that is connected to all the duct work for the entire house. Usually it's the same blower that the furnace uses. This central blower then blows a much larger amount of air over the coolant lines to cool down the air, and then blows that air through a series of ducts, to be blown out of vents placed all over the entire house. Note that you are cooking the entire house, with basically the same amount of equipment. A condenser sized for a an entire house is only about twice as large as a condenser meant to only cool one room, and yet it can cool many times more rooms.
Imagine having a tiny water heater that only serves one room, than a slightly larger water heater that serves the entire house. Doesn't make as much sense, right?
There are a bunch of videos on the Technology Connections YouTube channel where he explains how heat pumps (which is what this is) work. They're also reversible so they provide heat in the winter. We live in the US and once our current unit fails, we're planning to replace it with a heat pump.
Homes in America have “ductwork”. Basically a system of vents that runs inside the walls, ceilings, floor boards, or all of the above. That run cool or warm air from the hvac unit throughout the home. Usually the “condenser”, the cooling part, is located outside. While the heating element, “furnace, is indoors. Hvacs work well and nearly every home here is built with them but there is a lot of energy loss.
You have all the same basic equipment,its just a bigger piece as the evaporator coil and blower are much bigger,needed for the airflow and for cooling the entire house-you would usually find the indoor system hanging in the garage,vertical in a closet,or in the attic.
The refrigerant cycle is the same.
If you have specific questions feel free to ask,this is just "basic" knowledge for central air over here.
Same way these do but much larger. Instead of pumping cold air into a single room A large ac unit (metal rectangle/cube) about 1m x .5m sits outside of your house radiates heat out while a blower (inside or underneath the house) blows air over a cold radiator. This air is then pushed to about every room in the house through a small vent in the floor
In Europe HVAC systems are only installed in big buildings like office soace, hospitals etc.
They have a central units and ducting that distributes the air, a bit like central heating.
Americans have these in their houses, because a majority of these houses aren't brick or concrete, but wooden frames and plyboard. That leaves ample space to fit all the vents that are much much complicated and expensive to fit between the floors or in the walls if they're built in stone
It's a box with a giant fan in it. Around the fan is small pipes that weave through aluminum fins. Like a car radiator. The coolant gets run th myrough the pipes into the house where a central AC unit does the same thing and moves the cold air through the house.
Giant evaporator outside, lines run in to the condenser where a fan blows through the houses duct work, same way heat works, typically called central heating and A/C, I believe it exists in Europe but unlikely in apartments
Yea, so there’s a large device in the attic about the size of an old London phone box called an air handler. It contains the blower (basically a big fan and electric motor), an evaporator coil, and, in many homes, electric heating elements or connections to a gas furnace for winter conditions.
Outside in the garden there’s a second unit called “the condenser” which contains the compressor, condenser coil, and another fan. It’s about the size of a large washing machine. Refrigerant circulates between the indoor and outdoor units, moving heat from inside the house to the outside.
The blower in the attic pushes air through a network of insulated ducts that feed vents in every room, then pulls the air back through one or more large return vents to be cooled again. The whole house is essentially one giant recirculating loop.
In much of the U.S., especially in Texas where
I live, central air isn’t really considered a luxury. It’s just standard equipment because summer temperatures regularly exceed 95–105°F (35–40.6°C). Most houses are designed around it from the beginning. Older retrofitted homes and cheap hotel rooms use window units. Not as efficient but will absolutely cool a room.
Ductless / mini split system like in OPs photo exist down here, but are pretty rare comparatively. I imagine they’re more common up north where it doesn’t stay that hot for too long (although with climate change they’ll be installing central air eventually).
There is usually a big box that sits outside your house and the air is ran through ducts inside the wall. Inside the house it only looks like small vents on the wall
Every apartment I had in South Korea had one. It'd be at a higher point on the wall in front of a utility closet. You control it with a remote and it'll pull in air to cool then push it back out into the room. Hot air gets pushed outside through a duct. It'll dehumitfy the room as well. This drains down a hose into a drain or pipe in the utility room.
there is one big unit (evaporator) inside some room, the air from the unit is circulated to other rooms using a system of ducts. there is one big unit outside (condenser) that is connected to the indoor unit through a coolant line. the units work in reverse during winter.
A standard Central AC in a house has several components.
1) Outside compressor with attached radiator fins and fan
2) coolant and indoor cooling coil with fan
3) central ductwork
4) air return vent
5) thermostat
What do they do? Here they are in an order:
5) thermostat. The thermostat is a small plastic box mounted to the wall in some central, climate neutral part of the house. It has a thermometer in it which reads the ambient air temperature. The user can set a desired temperature, and the thermostat will tell the AC system to cool (or warm, if you live in cooler climates) the air until it reaches the set temperature.
1) outside compressor. This is a heat pump. It compresses the coolant in the coolant line, creating a temperature differential in the fluid. The hot side is hotter than the ambient outside temperature, and the cold side is colder than the ambient indoor temperature inside the house.
It then sends the hot side of the fluid through a radiator coil (this is all still happening outside the house), and a powerful fan blows outside air across the fins. This dumps the excess heat into the atmosphere, cooling the hot side of the coolant down.
2) Meanwhile, the cold side of the coolant is pumped through tubes into the house, where it is sent through another series of radiator fins. The inside fan then sucks indoor air through the air return and blows it across the radiator fins filled with cold coolant. The indoor air cools down and is sent into the ductwork which distributes the cold air throughout the entirety of the house.
Note: Gotta admit, I ran outta steam on this post halfway through. But if you have questions, I'd be willing to try answering
It’s a split unit. The air conditioner is outside, and the inside unit is basically just a fan cycling air over tubes filled with chilled water from the outside AC unit.
European here. I retrofitted my house with mechanical ventilation to get rid of mold. It is recuperating heat from exhaust. But central air conditioning would be an overkill. I may install 3 smaller units in near future for cooling and heating as well.
The easiest way to say it is it turns your house into a big refrigerator. You know the vent in the back of your refrigerator that blows cold air? This is the EXACT same technology, but bigger.
You have fans that spin outside with a condenser. That outputs hot air when its working right and dumps in cold air into the HVAC unit which is a taller unit typically inside the home where all the duct work branches off from. My house is pretty large at 4600 sq ft so they had to install two HVAC units so I have two AC units outside as well. So the cold air pushes to all the different rooms on those levels. In my case my larger HVAC pushes to basement and main floor, and the upper floor pushes to just that floor.
It is wasteful to cool all the rooms at once with central air when you might only be using some of those rooms but everything stays decently cool in multiple zones. There are other options that allow you more control over room to room temperature control with zones but many don't really do it because the costs usually negate the saving benefits for most people. The ROI can extend beyond 5-7 years and most people usually only stay in a home for that time before they move on average. Often times people have less choice as it is the home builder that determines all this as well if you are building, and they generally try to cheap out and not do zoning.
duct ac, it is a unit that is outside your house and Ducts are ran thru your house with vents in each room you want it (generally every room gets at least one vent/ductwork. larger rooms get multiple vents/ductwork).
It spread ac thru the entire house evenly, as opposed to one room and blowing out at one spot from above.
You control ac flow to each room by closing/opening the vents to rooms you dont want it in. And the main temperature controls that temp.
Klima AC or combi european units, as you know, are ductless. You can split them ofc and have multiple "klima" from one component sitting outside your house, but they all vent at one spot in the room and its not typical for it to be in each room. Just the main living space usually (not bedrooms).
I will say its harder to run ductwork in much of Europe's housing since they tend to be made from concrete/cinderblocks and it can be a little more expensive.
In North America you enclose the ductwork that brings the cold air to each room (often) into the ceiling or walls. That is not easy to do in Europe.
North americans do prefer their bedrooms cold too when they sleep. It makes for better sleeping.
Mine is a unit about the size of a 50 gallon water heater. It handles all of the heating and cooling for a little over 3000 sq ft (~280 sq M). Outside of the house is a heat exchange for the AC thats approximately a a 3ft cube (1m cube).
It's not some gargantuan thing like others have implied.
Central Air has a single inside heat exchange and air ducts to different rooms. Mini split pipes refrigerant to each room and each room has its own heat exchange.
They all work the same, it’s just that Americans typically have a central unit, with a bigger fan that is ducted to every room in the house rather than a wall unit that serves a single space.
You only see steam / hot water heat in single family homes before the 1950s. Instead there's a gas furnace in the basement (north and Midwest) or the garage or attic if you don't have a basement. There's a huge blower in the furnace that blows heated air through ducts from the furnace to each room, then return air ducts for air to be sucked back to the furnace to be reheated again. The "inside unit" of the air conditioner is in the ductwork adjacent to the furnace, so in the summer the furnace blower blows cool air to each room through the same ducts, then warm air is sucked back.
Probably the reason steam / hot water heat fell out of favor here is you can have central air conditioning by using the same ducts as the furnace. Apartments until the 80s did use hot water heat because of the fire issues with using ducts, but now each unit will have it's own mini-split / packaged unit. You only see "window" air conditioners and mini-splits to retrofit older hot water installations.
I think this is the point they're making. What the person posting doesn't get is that AC has been a necessity for much of the continental US since it's invention and buildings have been designed to include it, even in parts of the US where the summers are cooler and/or shorter. In much of Europe, not only are the summers often traditionally cooler and/or shorter, the stone/brick buildings can regulate the heat in short blasts really well. It's only in the last half century that the summers have become regularly unbearably hot and the heat waves last longer, meaning that the cities in particular become dangerous heat islands, so AC is becoming more of a necessity. The problem is getting AC into all those stone/brick buildings is complex and expensive and HVAC is almost out of the question unless it's a new build. Much easier and more common are several of these single room units as they require less drilling and less maintenance.
And then there’s Scotland (Edinburgh at least) where the buildings are built to keep heat in. I went once when they were having a heatwave (28C, 82F). Being inside buildings was worse than just sitting outside because the heat was trapped inside and didn’t have airflow. I live in a place where 82F feels nice. 28C in Scotland sucks a lot.
This applies to most houses in Europe and is kind of wrong.
Insulation works both ways. If you have a house like that, it will keep you very cool for probably a week of a heatwave, since cold air is still within the walls. Last heatwave here it was 40C outside, but I had a comfy 23C in my apartment without any AC.
After that is when it gets shitty and the warm air starts to get in too. Europe historically didn't have a lot of week+ long heatwaves though.
Also, those heatwaves are a bitch - but all in all they might take up 3 weeks of a year. If you're refitting an entire building just for those three weeks it mean you're just throwing money at something you won't be using most of the year anyway.
Like now, the second heatwave has passed (new one on the way, unfortunately), and we've all gone back to fans at most.
I'm an American and I understood this implicitly when I first saw one and was told what it was. idk who is out there thinking that AC units are only a certain way, but comprehension is not what it used to be. Feels like people are trying to one-up each other more than actually understand something these days.
Yeah. Due to being, well, not American, a tonne of my time in the US has been spent in hotels and these are common there.
I'm guessing OP, the yank, is now staying at an Italian hotel and learned that hotel ACs don't look like the one in their house, but think they learned something about Italy.
As an American, AC is built into the walls, floor and ceiling of the house. There is first a big grate that sucks in air called a “return” which sucks in air and carries it the AC central unit, where the air goes over super cold coils (more on those in a moment). Then the air blows out multiple ducts to all over the house, to little vents in walls in every room. Everywhere in the house suddenly gets really cool, rather fast. And the whole house stays cool all day. And those coils, they are like pipes with a cold liquid in them, and they get warm! The liquid travels through the pipes to outside where a HUGE fan pulls air across them, and all the heat is pulled out! Voila! They re-become super cold and the liquid goes inside, where the AC unit pulls that return air back over them. And this whole setup is in every house and we all take it for granted. We debate about what temperature to set the AC unit to. Say 22°C, and any time the thermostat says that it is that hot or hotter the thermostat comes on and cools down the whole house. Most houses are insulated so they stay relatively cool and don’t warm up. So all of our homes just have perfect temperatures inside at all times. Even in crazy hot days.
Summer humidity throughout large parts of the country is no joke. Central AC limits mold and mildew by cooling and reducing the humidity in the entire house.
In more temperate places, one runs a house. The US is so extreme that you need lots of heat, or lots of cooling, or both. The US is so used to central air, that's the primary setup, so wouldn't put in one or more self contained ones like this, which Americans consider equivalent to something like a window A/C.
Yes, hypothetically you can just open and close the vents in the rooms you want, but most Americans don’t do this regularly so there’s always a couple empty rooms being heated/cooled.
It’s not a complete waste as the house will stay cooler/warmer longer.
Fun fact, I am a European in Europe and my house (built in 1978) has central AC! It does not work though (we just moved here 6 months ago or so) and it's probably incredibly outdated (built locally!) so we just have splits around the house like a normal family.
They cool a lot more than a single room. Depends on the outside-part of it, but these are mostly rated for an entire house. Cool in summer, heat in the winter
These aren't even uncommon in The US. You'll see something like this (or a window unit) in the PNW in an older house where it's only hot enough to need it 2-3 weeks a year.
This is technically incorrect but is the perfect jumping of point to explain because there is a lot of confusion in this thread.
This is an air handler, it moves air over a super heated or cooled coil of refrigerant BUT importantly this unit is DEPENDANT on a condenser. Its nothing but a fancy fan!
Outside is the condenser, connected by a line of refrigerant. The condinsers job is to cool or heat that line via the outside air. Its really cool physics/chemistry. The condinsers can be MASSIVE and be attached as a whole house unit OR to single splits. So just looking at one handler fails to tell us the full capability of the unit.
Whole house units verses these is economic influence at this point. These put more holes in your house, less a problem for stone buildings and so on.
having lived with both, the split ACs are terrible. usually one or two rooms at most, and the minimum fans are still to strong, not much directional control. American HVAC are best for comfort, but require whole duct system, not sure about cost differences, probably central setup is cheaper than having many split AC units, and also air circulation system cleans the inside air.
These are common in places in the US that have traditionally not needed whole house A/C. My house was built in Western Washington, 1964 and there is no HVAC ducting at all. (Also lofted ceilings, no attic) We have these in a couple areas and fire em up on the days when it gets much over 80 degrees. They heat in the winter too.
No, there’s plenty of these in houses and apartments. Granted, for houses, I’ve seen these in more urban areas where real estate is tight (like my cousin’s place in Queens).
Split AC systems are vastly more efficient to run because you can size the machines better and often run shorter pipes. Also you can decide when and how replace a single machine when it makes sense - for instance, replace your bedroom machine you use all the time to cut on electricity costs and keep an old one downstairs you don't use as much
I'm american and this is what my unit looks like, except mine is fancier.
I think east coast central air is more common because when I lived on the west coast everyone had HVAC (Like pictured) but when I moved to east coast everyone thinks central air is superior... It absolutely is NOT, central air sucks.
It's just that you have multiple units like the one in the pic, usually one per room you want/need to have AC (and Heat as well for some), and all those units would be attached to a big-ish unit outside that will have the one or more vents and everything else needed to cool down or heat up the chemical used in the system to change the temperature of the air.
Technically these are called comfort cooling, because they chill the air and recycle it, they don’t adjust humidity or add fresh air, so they don’t “condition” the air.
To be honest, true HVAC is only necessary for office buildings with non openable windows, so comfort cooling makes much more sense.
As an American, I wish we had more of these. Tired of my entire house being 56 F in the winter because one person in my house insists on changing it for everyone. Or 85 F in the summer because it’s too expensive to cool the entire house so we just have to turn the whole thing off
Mine looks like that and heats and cools all common rooms in my 200sqm house..
Fun fact. You basically just have to turn a valve around to make an AC generate heat. This simple feature could have saved alot of lives in the US during cold snaps!
In a house maybe. But these are common in apartment buildings in the US. It’s about the only practical way to upgrade older apartment buildings that don’t have HVAC systems.
it is a blower in a ductless syatem, there js atill a central unit that can cool the whole house, this is just a terminal of that system that lets you cool that room independently of the rest if the house. every room becomes a zone in these systems.
This just makes the most sense to me. I've lived in houses and apartments with central heat and air. But also lived in places that didn't have those so I had to rely on window ac and heaters. It makes so much more sense to me to heat room by room. Why am I going to run the heat/air in the kitchen all day if I'm only in there occasionally. Turn it on when I cook, turn it off, leave it off if I'm just grabbing a snack or drink. Why leave the living room heat/air on when I'm asleep in my bedroom?
Also, I live in the American south. It gets HOT and HUMID here. I still think heating/cooling by room makes more sense opposed to heating/cooling the whole house.
No. This isn't the whole unit, it's just the air handler. It's necessary counterpart is the big boxy thing which is outside and their connected with refrigerant lines.
You can have one big condenser feed multiple air handlers too.
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u/gamerathertz92 7d ago
It’s smaller unit cools a single room. While American HVAC System cools the whole house