power consumption, SEER, etc.

[Tony]

Bill I am not HVAC person however I am refrigeration mechanic or tech. whatever you wish to apply, if you think that you are puzzel by SEER formula let me gave you something ales to think about Must of us supose to know OHMS LAW at least I think so, lets take your problem for example at round off numbers Voltage is 220 your total Curent is 18.

18 x 220= 3960 watts according to formula 1 watt=3.412 Btus 3960 watts x 3.412= 13,511 Btus yet your AC is rated at 36,000 Btus your Ac puts out 22,489 Btus more then is taking in. So your AC is Apx 266% efficent. That is called energy saving! WOOooooo Hello I am not aducated am'I confused? hell yes and in my opinion person who came up with this formulas must have few beers or did it purposly so that must of us can not come out with proper answer do I need education yes but I would still say the person that came up with this system was stupid arrogant idiot. Dido

[Sparks Johanson]

Not quite. That means that your AC uses 3960 watts (13511btu) to move

36000 Btu&#39;s from here to there. This gives you an EER of 36000/3960 of about 9.1. Or, you could say that for every watt of electricity is consumes, it moves 2.66 watts out of the conditioned space. That&#39;s not the same thing at 266% efficient. It does, however, mean that (if you had a heat pump) you could move at least 2.66 watts into the space for every watt of energy you consume. Recall, furnaces that burn fuel cannot provide more that 1 watt of heat per watt of energy consumed, i.e, their efficiency is < 1 (Say 80 or 90%.)

Lesson? It&#39;s often cheaper to move heat around than to create it.

[Tony]

Mr. S. Johanson You are right and I understand what are you saying. what I am saying that formula at very beginning it was not design the way I see it as should have been as you stated for every watt of electricity is consumed it moves apx.2.66 watts out of conditioning space that you may say that you take volts wagon to move car carrier, or taking step up transformer 50 volt @ 2amp. to generate 100 volt and 1 amp. is not going to happen I am sorry but AC formulas that is in use to me do not compute. any time you are changing energy from one to another they are loses it doesn&#39;t matter how change or conversions take it&#39;s place, how efficient change is they are loses.

My point is that our predecessors have screwed up.

[Sparks Johanson]

Well, think about it this way. Your air conditioner is doing work by moving stuff from here to there. Don&#39;t worry about the stuff, for the moment. Now, how efficiently can it do that? Certainly, less that

100%, as no machine can do work 100% efficiently. How inefficient is it? An ideal air conditioner would have a Coefficient of Performance of about 8 or 9, depending on the precise conditions. This is known as the Carnot efficiency, and is the very best you can do, with a perfectly efficient machine. (This is calculated by Tevap/(Tcond - Tevap) where T&#39;s are in Kelvin)

So, your air conditioner, with a COP of 2.66, is actually about 2.66/8 = 33% efficient. Not that great.

I don&#39;t quite understand your point with the volts wagon and the car carrier.

Note, that your AC doesn&#39;t "put out" BTUs, it simply moves them from one place to another. Carnot says that to move the 36,000 BTUs to the outside will require about 4500 Btus of energy input. Yours is actually using 13,511.

Let&#39;s look at it from another perspective. How much energy does it take to move a container with 2.6 gallons of gas up a hill? (Depends, of course, on a lot of factors.) Let&#39;s say it takes 1 gallon. Would you say that because I put 1 gallon into the truck, and ended up at the top of the hill with the 2.6 gallons that my truck is 266% efficient? Certainly not! Yet, this is essentially what you are doing if you say that an air conditioner is 266% efficient because it can move 2.66 Btus for every Btu&#39;s worth of electricity.