eli5 What is it that makes air conditioning more challenging than heating?
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It’s not?
The only difference in the two systems is the use of a sealed gas to soak up heat from the interior of a building or car.
Both use fans to move heated/cooled air.
Heat is relatively easy to produce by people.
Often in machines too much heat is an issue.
Electricity flowing through resistive wires generates heat. Using a car engine loses about 70% of its energy to waste heat.
Cooking and removing heat is harder. Often it involves taking excess energy and then pushing it into an area that also has a higher energy state. Taking heat from indoors, and then dumping it outside where it is also warm, requires gas exchanges, compressors, and radiators. Opposed to heat generation that could even be done accidentally by running a computer or other electronic device.
Efficiency wise, heat generation with electricity is 100% efficient.
There isn’t any waste when the goal is to just create what is normally considered waste.
A way to look at it too isn’t producing cold, but removing heat. Need more heat? Just make more.
Need to remove it? Well you need to gather air with large fans, have a gas condenser and let the gas expand outside too push the heat outside, then compress the gas again, and then pump it back indoors to gather more heat.
It’s completely dependent on where you live. In Nevada where the winter lows are normally in the 40s°F and summers highs are in the 110s°F I only need to warm my house up 30 degrees to stay comfortable, but I need to cool it by 40 degrees to stay comfortable. During the winter the sun is helping warm my house and during the summer it’s fighting against me. In Minnesota where the lows get down to the teens I have to warm my house up 50 degrees to keep it nice while I would only have to cool it down 20 or 30 degrees in the summer to keep it cool.
Heat (Or more technically, thermal energy) is very easy to make. All you need to do is burn something, or run an electric current through something. On the other hand, heat is very hard to get rid of. There are some chemical reactions that reduce temperature, but they’re not practical to use on a large scale in the same way you can use, say, the reaction of natural gas with oxygen in furnaces to heat buildings. Instead, you usually have to move the heat somewhere else. Air conditioners are machines that move thermal energy from inside a building to outside a building, and moving that energy requires more complicated machinery.
It really isn’t.
I mean yeah it’s easy to heat things, but in terms of energy use it’s just as easy to cool as it is to heat.
Furnaces are basic mechanical knowledge. Don’t even need to learn about them to be certified.
Heat flows from hot to cold. Just like water flows from high to low.
When you are heating, you can have a fire, electric heating element or steam/ hot water next to your room (separated by something like a copper tube) and heat will flow from hot stuff to the cold room.
When air conditioning you are trying to get some heat from your room (which is colder than outside) and dump it into the warmer outside. So pumping heat from cold to hot. You are going uphill.
It’s easy to pump energy into a system to create heat. There are many ways to do it. All mechanical action produces some heat as a byproduct due to friction anyway. Even an AC does. It’s much trickier to get energy out of a system so much that it is substantially cooler than ambient temperatures. How many ways can you think of to do it? I can only think of a couple to be honest. The trick is to take heat from one place and release it in another in a repeatable and rapid way without adding heat to the system you are trying to cool.
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