When looking to cool either your apartment or house in Brisbane, how do you do it?
Certainly, you can choose a standing fan, but that will only whip around warm air and do nothing much in the end. They’re also pretty expensive to run.
The two main choices in the Australian market are evaporative cooling and air conditioning. Which of these are best for people living in Brisbane?
Evaporative Cooling – What Is It?
Evaporative coolers function by using moist cooling pads with air blown across them to lower the temperature. There is usually an outdoor and an indoor unit for evaporative cooling, so there must
be sufficient space for both of these. They also use some ducting around the property.
Evaporative Cooling – Works Well in Temperate, Low Humidity Environments
Evaporation is endothermic. This means the water evaporation rate slows when it encounters high humidity. Therefore, evaporative cooling is far less effective as the humidity levels rise. Also, how
cool it can get a room, apartment or house varies depending on the extremes of temperature each day. When thinking about Brisbane, you’ve got temperatures that can reach 40 degrees in the hottest
part of the year, and the humidity can easily climb to between 50-70%. This means evaporative cooling is probably not your best option.
Air Conditioning – What Is It?
Air conditioning works to extract both heat and moisture present in a room where an AC unit has been installed. The ducting allows for cooler air to be transferred into various rooms in the home. Meanwhile, each AC unit draws the warmth out and removes the heat from it. Refrigerant vapour is used in the process to assist in this functionality. There are usually indoor AC units, outdoor
extractors, and ducting installed too.
AC Cooling – Works Well in Hotter, More Humid Environments
Air con units when powerful enough for the room size that they’re fitted into are far better performers than evaporative cooling. This is particularly truer the hotter and more humid the setting where they come into their own just as the evaporative type is failing to deliver. AC units can indeed be a more expensive to run (particularly older window mounted models), but they’re still the best option in humid places like Brisbane. While other parts of Australia can be less humid with lower temperatures, making them more pleasant and suitable for evaporative cooling, in humid climates such as Brisbane, they’re not the best choice. Air conditioning is affordable and clearly the best option.
0 Comments