eli5 What is it that makes air conditioning more challenging than heating?
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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.
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