Air Conditioning in the Summer

It's already started to heat up after this historically mild winter, and when summer rolls around no one wants to be the person whose air conditioning is acting up. Everyone has been there: you're sweating constantly, the few fans you have plugged into the wall are not emanating nearly enough breeze (the ones on the ceiling are whirling so violently that you're afraid that they might unhinge and fall on top of you), and all of the effort you are putting into cooling down is actually just making you even hotter. It's not much fun -- and isn't that the whole point of summer? To try to make up for all the fun you could not have when it was winter?

Apparently even the Ancient Romans struggled with this problem. That is hardly surprising. Anyone that has walked around the old Roman Forum in July knows that it has got to be one of the most dizzyingly hot places on the planet. This is part of the reason why the Romans constructed their now famous aqueducts throughout the city, which circulated water in the homes and buildings of the citizens in an attempt to mollify the staggering summer heat. Ever since then, scientists and inventors from second century China to the United States' own Benjamin Franklin have experimented with cooling methods. However, the first real breakthrough came in 1902 when Willis Haviland Carrier built the first modern air conditioning unit, which for the first time could control not only the temperature but the humidity in a building, as well.

Now AC units are commonly part of larger HVAC systems (short for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning). Perhaps different from what one might expect, the first objective of the unit is not to produce cold temps, but instead to remove the heat from the area. The process of heat removal is obviously a difficult and complicated process. (After all, not all of were mechanical engineering majors.) The temperature is changed through what is called the refrigeration cycle, which uses radiation, convection, and a heat pump to cool off high temps.

Now there are, of course, many varieties of air conditioning units depending upon the type of building that is being cooled. For the purpose of determining the most efficient unit, professionals distinguish and classify buildings as one of the following: low-rise residential, high-rise residential, commercial, institutional, industrial, or, more recently, sports stadium. For smaller residential areas, such as apartments or single rooms, often professionals will install a unitary system that is simply placed in a window or a portable unit, which, as its name implies, can be moved from one room to another very easily and with little to no installation. Larger residential areas are better cooled with a central unit, the most common form found in the U.S. today. Central air conditioning units function in the same manner that most other units do, but have the capability of removing dust, lint, and other pollutant particles through their specially designed filters. Regardless, no matter what type of unit you need, make sure it's working so that you can get a reprieve from the heat this summer.