I’ve read every single manual on the Internet and I still don’t understand what the difference is. I’ve also used both settings and don’t see much difference. When I use dry, the room cools off, but the machine will shut down and turn back on which I find very annoying. When I use cool the room, the room will cool but the machine stays on.
It’s currently nighttime with the 70° temperature outside in the 71% humidity. WWYD right now, for example?
In: Technology
The “dry”-setting makes your A/C function like a dehumidifier. Dehumidifiers work by cooling air down, which causes moisture in the air to condense (i.e. turn into liquid, which can be collected or disposed), and then heating the air back up to (approximately) its original temperature (ideally by running the air past the part of the A/C that gets hot anyway as part of the heat exchange mechanism). Thereby removing moisture from the air and lowering the humidity.
The “cool”-setting does just that: it cools the air, while omitting the step of heating it back up. This ends up dehumidifying it as well. This might come as a surprise to you, if you know that normally, when you lower the temperature of air, its (relative) humidity increases. The reason an A/C does dry the air as it cools is that, locally, inside the machine, the air gets much cooler than the target room temperature, in order to cool the room quickly. This (again, same as in the “dry” setting) causes the moisture in the air to condense into liquid water, and that liquid water is either collected or disposed outside (e.g. via a tube). And then the greatly cooled air mixes with the room air and warms back up some. So this way, water still gets removed from the air, and the humidity is lowered.
If the A/C also ends up cooling your room while on the “dry” setting, this may be because the amount of cooling and heating that go into the dehumidifying process aren’t perfectly balanced. Perhaps the manufacturer even deliberately erred on the side of cooling (a little) rather than heating (a little), given how they know A/Cs are typically used.
As for WIWD in that scenario: you haven’t told us what it’s like *inside* the room, which is more relevant. You want to keep the humidity indoors below 60%, as much as possible, and ideally (for your own comfort) a bit lower than that (30-50% or 40-60% are optimal, depending on who you ask). If it were 71% humidity *inside*, I’d say definitely do something about it. And then what you do depends on whether you are okay with the temperature. If it’s 70°F inside as well, then personally I wouldn’t necessarily set the A/C to cool.
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