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New Airconditioning

There's a phrase that says "You get what you pay for", and indeed, this holds true for airconditioning. As you may remember, my last aircon was somewhat basic and noisy and also prevented sleep whilst on as it sounded like having a lawnmower in the room! The Pinguino PAC L41AH is available from john lewis and is rated at 10000BTU. If you have a computer or anything that produces heat in your room, you'll need at least 10kBTU in my experience.

As far as noise goes, I've found that standing about 1 meter away with a radioshack sound level meter, the noise reading (Weighting A) is about 54-55dB when the fan is running slowly and about 56-57dB when the fan is running at full speed. This is a vast improvement, my old aircon had a noise level of 65+dB! Like many things, the noise level is influenced by how far you're away from the unit, objects in your room that reflect the noise and what floor it's on (in general, carpet is quieter than hard floor).

So let's have a look at the back. As you can see, the designers put a circular intake port in the back as well as the usual tube to eject the hot air. This is a great feature as you can easilly pipe air into the condenser from the outside, meaning no net change in air volume in the room! The diagram shows what I mean.

I should say that the instructions don't mention running the aircon in this configuration, nor do they recommend it. You are not provided with the extra tube and as you can see in my photos, I just use some duct tape to form a seal (the duct tape is not sticky as it's double folded to form a sealing flap).

One could argue that running the aircon in this configuration means the turbo fan on the condenser has to do more work. However, air would be drawn into the room anyway as you're using the fan to push air out. Hence all you're really doing is making sure the air that is entering the room comes down this tube. I have sealed the window such that the only air that comes into the room is down this pipe. The wider the tube the better. If you do a "mass balance", air being pushed out must be replaced by air coming in (otherwise you'd evacuate your room). This pipe provides a channel for the incoming air to flow back into the condenser.

The more observant amongst you will have noticed that the hot air ejected may flow back into the air intake. This is very bad and you need to make sure this doesn't happen. By directing the outflow "jet" somewhere away from the intake, you can ensure that only warm outside air is coming through the intake tube, not hot air from the condenser. Again, I make no assurances that your aircon won't break in this configuration, but personally I've found it keeps the room cooler and should be more efficient.

In the diagram, the conventional aircon doesn't have an intake hole. However, by sealing the window, ensuring that any air piped out by the aircon can be balanced by air coming in through a second pipe, you can point this tube at the condenser intake grill. It's not as effective but it's a step up from just letting the warm air mix with your cold air. The aircon costs about £450 from john lewis and I haven't had problems with it so far. Power draw from the mains is about a maximum of 1030W, though if the outside air is cool then this figure can go down to 900W or less. This model doesn't come with HEPA filters, but since you're not mixing your inside/outside air, you shouldn't need one :).

One last word on the temperature setting. I've found mine doesn't keep the track of the temperature very well at all. Possibly because of the way I've set it up and the location of said sensor. What I do know is that if you set it to 24 or less, it never goes off (even if the room temp is below 20) and if you set it to 27 or above, it can turn off, but then never comes back on untill you're boiling! My advice is to keep the remote control near you and just turn it on/off as you see fit. The timer function should aid you in doing this too.