I’ve had portable AC units before that had reservoirs which needed to be emptied a couple of times per day (constant use) and I’d have to dump a gallon of water out.
I don’t understand how this portable AC unit is able to function without moisture collecting in large amounts.
This is a portable, not a window-mount. It doesn’t drip water from the out-duct.
Additionally, about every 30 minutes it makes a sound that is very clearly ‘trickling water’. Not sure if that helps, but I’m trying to add as much info as possible.
I’m baffled
In: Engineering
There are newer portable AC units that have a self-evaporation feature, where the water from condensation is used in the cooling process and evaporates out the duct along with heated air.
When I lived in Vegas (20% humidity), my portable A/C never accumulated any water from the condensate drain. Now I live in SE Texas(80% humidity) and the same portable A/C generates about a pint/hour.
Where do you live?
Some AC units, pump the condensate, over the heat exchange coils. The cold condensate water, absorbs more heat as it evaporates, helping increase the overall efficiency. What doesn’t evaporate, is collected in the reservoir.
I’m not an expert. But since nobody else has tackled this, I’ll explain what I do know (primarily from watching Technology Connections videos).
The trickling you hear is refrigerant – a substance that boils at a relatively low temperature and is kept in a sealed loop. It is compressed to a liquid which heats it up, it is then run past a radiator outside to cool it down, then brought back in where it’s allowed to decompress back to a gas, cooling it down. This cycle is what produces the cooling effect, a d it’s completely sealed.
The water in the reservoir is a separate thing. Cold air holds less moisture than warm air so as the air is cooled, water vapour becomes liquid (this is condensation you see on windows on a cold day). Since the pipes carrying the now cold gas are very cold, the water vapour in the air around it condenses into water droplets on the pipes. These water droplets then fall into the reservoir.
If you live in a dry climate, then there isn’t much vapor in the air to condense. Additionally, a lot of it will evaporate back into the air as it warms up, so you would expect there to be much in the reservoir when you empty it.
AC works by transferring heat from inside of a space to the outside of that space. The water you mentioned is a side effect, not the AC doing the cooling.
The fluid you hear is refrigerant doing its work. Think of refrigerant like sweat.
The main principles you need to know:
1. heat is absorbed by a liquid to change it to a gas (like sweat evaporating off your skin steals body heat). And conversely, if you make a gas change back to a liquid it returns the heat that it stole.
2. You can also change a liquid to a gas by lowering its pressure. And conversely condense a gas to a liquid by increasing its pressure.
The important parts of the above is that we can change the temperature that things evaporate and condense at by changing their pressure. So we can evaporate to absorb heat from the room while within a cold room at low pressure, and condense to releae heat to outside while it is hot out at high pressure.
Breaking it down into the AC cycle:
AC is easiest to think about by following where the heat is being transferred.
First heat from your space is absorbed by the refrigerant. This heat changes the refrigerant from a low pressure cold liquid to a low pressure warmer gas – the refrigerant evaporates like sweat off your skin. This is in an ‘evaporator’. It steals the heat from your room to do this.
Now we need to get the heat out of your space. It’s still trapped in the evaporated refrigerant. So we compress it into a high pressure gas (in a ‘compressor’) and then condense it into a high pressure liquid (in a ‘condenser’). This last step is the opposite of the first step. Heat is given off to condense the gas. This is done outside of the space you want to cool.
Finally we need to make it low pressure again to get it ready for the evaporator. This is done by expanding the condensed refrigerant (in an ‘expansion valve’) from a high pressure liquid to a low pressure gas.
If you have a portable air conditioner that isn’t somehow putting the heat outside of the space you are trying to cool then you have a fancy fan, not an air conditioner.
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