May 6, 2007

NewAir AC-12000E Portable Air Conditioner

We won't be able to afford installation of a new more efficient central heater and air conditioning system this year, and with summer coming up the second cooling upgrade is a NewAir AC-12000E portable air conditioner (ordered from the link provided). The specifications on this unit are extremely good, under the assumption they are accurate since I could not find the manufacturer's web site. EER is 14.46 with 12,000 BTUs for 830W/7.9A. We are going to keep this in the computer room, since that's the hottest room in the house and also the one where overheating will cause material damage.

NewAir AC-12000ESince the unit does draw 8A, and the computers already draw close to 15A on their circuit, it's sharing a circuit with the other bedroom outlets where the upstairs A/V equipment is plugged in. We will have to swap in and out with the upstairs microwave, since the microwave uses 10A.

The plastic window bar is a little strange. I'm not entirely sure I've installed it correctly, but the instructions aren't completely clear on how it is supposed to be used, with respect to the inner-sliding plastic. There is some foam provided to try and keep the window seal intact, but I couldn't get it to be 100% tight vertically, and the inner-sliding plastic is slightly narrower than the outer-sliding piece, so the seal is not air-tight. It should be good enough though.

I did read some people talk about having to insulate the exhaust hose on different brand and model portable air conditioners. I'm not going to bother doing that unless we have to. So we'll try it without insulation for now, and see how hot it gets. The hose is only about five or six feet long though, which means you do need to be able to place the unit very close to the window. As you can see in the picture, we did have to remove one of the computer monitors to make room for the exhaust hose, but we don't use that monitor much anyway.

For the price, this unit is probably the best value I've been able to find, looking at various others online. We're only going to use it on hot days to keep the computer room temperature at around 77°C-80°C, when the outside temperature is warmer than that. So it shouldn't be in use a whole lot. It can only be used for the one room though, since it doesn't have enough BTUs to cool the entire house. And certainly cannot be used in the downstairs theater since that's open and cannot be closed off. So there may still be days we cannot operate the theater due to excessive heat. But at least we won't suffer any computer equipment damage due to overheating this summer.

Posted by josuah at May 6, 2007 8:47 PM UTC+00:00

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.wesman.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1141

Comments

Post a comment

July 2013
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
  1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31      

Search