For background, I’ve been looking to get a portable A/C for my bedroom until I can get a permanent unit installed, which will take time. Unfortunately I don’t have a window, just a sliding glass door. Would it be bad if I got a portable A/C and just pointed the vent tube into the hallway? Is there any hazard beyond dust?
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The heat discarded by an air conditioner must be moved somewhere. Unless you keep your room door closed, cooling off a room by warming up an adjacent hallway will just become a waste of energy.
Portable air conditioners breakdown the ambient air into a stream of cool air and a stream of hot air. The hot air must be vented outside or the room will simply not cool. In fact due to the energy required to run the machine, The room will be hotter than if the air conditioning was turned off.
You can’t create coldnes. An AC has to move heat away from your room through that vent. There are no dangerous vapors involved, but if you don’t seal off the path for the hot air to flow back to your room you are buying a very expensive and energy consuming fan.
Air conditioners don’t ‘make cold’. The way they work is to take heat from one place and put it in another while generating a little bit more heat at the same time.
Indoor A/C machines need a place to put the excess heat. So they take indoor air, cool down some of it, out the extra heat into the rest of it, blow the cool air back into the room, and blow the hot air out of the exhaust vent.
AC works by creating cold air AND hot air. Normally, you’d point the cold air inside, and hot air somewhere it won’t bother you. If you put it somewhere where they can mix, all you’re doing is heating the room very expensively.
An A.C. unit simply pumps heat from one place to another and the best way to do that is to pump the heat outside, pumping it to another part of your home is just wasting the energy as that hot air will find it’s way back in eventually.
Get a piece of wood, cut to the width of the AC unit, and as high as the doorway. Stick the AC in the doorway and use the wood to stop the heat from coming back in.
An ac can more accurately be called a “heat pump.”
It pumps heat out of the air in your house.
The heat goes into the refrigerant which is cooled by a fan. That fan blows the heat outside.
This actually makes the portable machines relatively inefficient compared to full window units as it has to pump some of the cooled air outside with the heat.
The net effect is cooling, but less cooling than a unit with the refrigerant cooling fan located outside.
This is why you usually have two units with a central cooling heat pump. Inside is the main distributer of the cooled air and outside is a big fan with coils and tubes where the refrigerant is cooled via the outside air.
Check out Technology Connections on YT for a full explaination on these AC units. He has a pretty good vid on them.
Look online there are some new small units that cool in a small area. They basically work by humidifying the air. They me son got one to add to his dorm room. It works ok in a small space.
Since you aren’t looking for a permanent fix you could try one or two of these.
Ok let’s NOT open the magic box. There very harmful chemicals in a AC, house or car or anywhere there’s AC. But don’t worry it’s safely sealed in side ” we don’t want to let it out to see”
We can make cold with compression of said chemicals the byproduct of compression is heat and a lot of heat. So we need inside cool , we’re going to have to exhaust the heat. Depending on what AC unit type we have will exhaust the heat differently.
So we are not getting rid of heat from inside our home. FYI open a window on a shady side of the house ” if it’s windy it won’t help much and about 30 min’s should be ok to close the window. turn the AC on the pressure from the AC blowing cool air inside will help push the warm air out which will help cool the home down faster.
Disclaimer I tried to explain it to a 10 year old, being Science and all. I hope this help take some misconstrued information from the AC world.
BTW the frig works on the same principle.
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