Though ordinary vented portable air conditioners offer quite a few advantages to those with a need or desire for cooler conditions during the summer, combined with a limited budget, they still have a few disadvantages as well.
They are quite bulky, occupying a noticeable area of the floor and trailing a robust hose to the window for venting hot air. They are also fairly noisy and may disturb you while you sleep or prevent easy conversation nearby. These potential failings are solved by the split air conditioner.
Split systems are a useful application of human ingenuity to solving the problem of cooling a room, while keeping the interior uncluttered and quiet. If you are bothered by the noise of an air conditioner and the fans it uses to suck in warm air and distribute cooled air, or if you want to keep the device's physical presence in your room to a minimum, these split mechanisms offer both features.
How a split air conditioner works
A split air conditioner consists of two separate portions connected by a cable. One portion of the machine is mounted on the exterior of the wall, while the other part is placed inside the room that is to be cooled. There are both single and multiple room versions of split units, allowing you to cool either a single room, a group of rooms, or different chambers at various times.
The exterior unit of a split system is the "noise generating" unit - since it is located well away from you, on the outside of your house, you will not hear it except when you walk by outside. This part of the system houses the compressor, where refrigerant is alternately exposed to low pressure, becoming a vapor, and high pressure, where it condenses into a liquid again. The heat exchange that occurs during this process expels heat picked up by the refrigerant in the room's interior, and sends cold refrigerant back into the house again.
A cable connects the two portions of the split system, with refrigerant hoses inside it. This cable usually passes through a small hole in the wall made for this purpose. The interior unit is purely designed to collect heat and radiate cold, shunting the heated refrigerant to the exterior unit.
All air circulation and moisture condensation occurs in the exterior unit, so all fan and compressor noise is generated here. The moisture is vented or drips out of the unit, so there is no condensate tank for you to empty. The interior unit is silent, since you cannot hear the refrigerant flowing through it, and is usually quite small and unobtrusive. This neat size and silent operation makes the split system very pleasant to use in your house.
Fresh air and split systems
Though a split air conditioner is much quieter than a portable or a window unit, it does have a drawback or two to balance out this superiority of design. Since all heat exchange occurs through liquid refrigerant, there is no air exchange between the house interior and the outdoors. Therefore, the air is cooled efficiently but may become stale. Some split air conditioners allow you to add an air hose, too, to bring fresh air into the house, but not all models offer this feature.
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