Straining your Back with the Air Conditioning Unit
For offices that don’t have permanent air conditioning in their building, most still have portable air conditioning units to keep their staff cool while at work. The portable air conditioning units can be a struggle to drag to the window and most people will wonder why they weigh so much.
The answer to why they are so heavy is because of the copper that’s inside of them. The systems have three important components including a compressor, a condenser and an evaporator. They are all loaded with copper which is weighs an enormous 558 pounds for each cubic feet of metal – pretty heavy! You may wonder what the components actually do. The condenser helps ready the system’s refrigerant for the cooling process, the evaporator helps cool the air and the compressor helps move refrigerant back and forth between them. These copper components make up almost 60% of the weight of the air conditioning unit!
Copper is the number 1 choice among air conditioning manufacturers as it’s abundant, a good conductor of heat and it’s relatively inexpensive which enables us to have access to cheap air conditioning units to help keep us cool in the heat.
With air conditioning units being around for some time, we would have thought that lighter, smaller, powerful units would have been invented by now. However, engineers are more interested and focusing on making the units more environmentally friendly. A technique called ‘dew-point cooling’ is being experimented on at the moment. Rather than using fossil fuels, this technique relies on the natural energy produced by evaporating water. Greener units may become available in the future, but it’s not clear if they’ll be significantly lighter.
The answer to why they are so heavy is because of the copper that’s inside of them. The systems have three important components including a compressor, a condenser and an evaporator. They are all loaded with copper which is weighs an enormous 558 pounds for each cubic feet of metal – pretty heavy! You may wonder what the components actually do. The condenser helps ready the system’s refrigerant for the cooling process, the evaporator helps cool the air and the compressor helps move refrigerant back and forth between them. These copper components make up almost 60% of the weight of the air conditioning unit!
Copper is the number 1 choice among air conditioning manufacturers as it’s abundant, a good conductor of heat and it’s relatively inexpensive which enables us to have access to cheap air conditioning units to help keep us cool in the heat.
With air conditioning units being around for some time, we would have thought that lighter, smaller, powerful units would have been invented by now. However, engineers are more interested and focusing on making the units more environmentally friendly. A technique called ‘dew-point cooling’ is being experimented on at the moment. Rather than using fossil fuels, this technique relies on the natural energy produced by evaporating water. Greener units may become available in the future, but it’s not clear if they’ll be significantly lighter.