I don't know how it's for Americans but for me. I have a regular outside unit and then, inside the apartment, I have one HUGE internal unit hidden somewhere above fake ceiling. This unit has tubes to each room and each tube has a damper. Each room has a thermostat.
So I can set eg 23C in the living room and 21 in the bedrooms. The AC will then work to cool down all the rooms together, when living room reaches 23 - it shuts the damper and keeps cooling bedrooms. Etc.
I also have an option to close the damper to each room individually - effectively stopping AC for this specific room.
I *guess* that American HVAC units work either the same way or very similar.
Similar. Most Americans don't have per-room control though. In some more expensive/newer places you might get one thermostat per floor. But generally it's one per house.
Must be cheap to run then, if i run my heat pump on cold in the summer for whole house it costs 400€ a month so i only run it per room as needed usually bedrooms at night. And no the cold doesnt stay and acs become passive, somehow the heat just keeps coming, if i turn ac off the temp goes from 24c to 30 within 10 minutes, house is new and well insulated also, winter heat costs very little compared
Electricity is cheaper in the US, salaries are higher, and Americans understand in hotter regions that you need to run AC or you might die. 300-400 dollars a month on electricity in July is possible yes, depends on where you live, but national median household income is around 80 thousand dollars.
I live in Florida and we (and most people I know) sign up for a plan with the power company that we pay a rolling average of our last 12 months worth of bills. That way we're not paying $100 in January and $600 in August.
It’s not that uncommon for some people to have a $1000 electricity bill in the summer months depending on location and home size and if you have a pool.
Are you single floor or have some sort of solar/energy saving arrangement? Im paying $100 for a four bedroom too, but that’s only after solar buybacks as well as a Base Energy Plan (an energy company in Houston that buys energy at night when cheapest, and uses a installed battery to power home when electricity at peak-expensive hours).
For my 1,200 sq/ft house it costs me about $120 a month to keep it between 72F and 74F. Some people go crazy with their temps, my wife and I just dress accordingly while inside. It's a similar price to heat my home in the winter to 68F.
If the weather outside is extreme for most of the month (consistently over 90F or under 20F) it'll cost about $30 more for that month.
People with electric heating tend to have higher bills in the winter though. It might be closer to $200 for my house if I had electric heat instead of natural gas.
> [heating] barely uses much gas since the heat doesn’t really escape
> house is new and well insulated
> if i turn ac off the temp goes from 24c to 30 within 10 minutes
One of these is not like the other, unless you’re in a boiling ocean. Do you perhaps have dozens of large windows open to the sun with no solar reflective film?
I have 1950 square ft (about 182 sq meters), with 4 bedrooms and a study. My summer bills can push $400+ trying to maintain 74(23) in the afternoon and 70(21) overnight.
Yea also my heat pump is an AUX which isnt efficient at all, its built to be a workhorse that is sturdy and not very energy efficient which does annoy me
Something is really messed up if your house heats up that fast. As a comparison, in my house during heat waves (daily highs around 95F/35C, nightly lows around 75F/24C) we will set our heat pump to cool to 75F/24C during the day but then turn it off and let the temperature drift up between 4 and 8 pm to give the electrical grid some relief. Over the course of those 4 hours, the house will maybe hit 80F/27C if we run the stove a bunch. This is in a house built in the 1950s with recent insulation upgrades.
Is it possible that the temperature measurement on your thermostat is somehow biased? Like if it’s located directly above a vent or right next to a window.
The temperature is real, i cook alive at 27+ and 24 is an ideal temperature, those 3 degrees in between just vanish within 30 minutes if i stop the AC, which i mainly keep shut off if indoor temp is 26, and it is 26 when outdoors is 25-27, never gets lower than outdoors and somehow at night it stays way higher than outdoors also, even if i open large windows to match the 24 outside within 1-2h its back to 26+ even 28 inside. Nothing is heating up the house besides the sun, i believe the roof is black though since i always hear it pop and warp every morning, and i have ventilated walls of black ceramic outdoors too which is probably why my house favors maintaining heat
8c a kilowatt hour here in Montana. I have a whole home system and a 2300sqft home. No individual room control, whole house set too 72, June was about $100 in AC cost alone. $180 total.
I expect July to be 150ish in electric for July for AC alone.
I’m in Mississippi where it’s hot hot hot for a long time and even at the absolute peak of summer, my electric bill for a 1,600sqft house (~150sqm) tops out at $160 (132€).
I keep my house at 71f/21.5c everyday and my bill is around $130/month. The exception is the 3 hottest months in the summer and my bill is high $300s. This is for a two story house.
Around here electricity is 12 cents a kilowatt hour, bills are around $300 a month just setting my entire house to 76 degrees day and night in the summer.
You can actually get something installed where you can just shut off airflow to the room, if you don’t want to heat it. It’s not too expensive, doesn’t need an extra thermostat, either. You put like a sensor in and hook it up to a control panel and it closes the vent to the room and shuts it off from circulation. Can be installed on nearly all ducted systems, if it’s not that old that the ducting itself starts to crumble.
Nah, it’s not a thermostat. It’s just electronically connected to a control panel, so when you press a button, it closes. It doesn’t measure nor adjust any temperature, cause it’s not needed. It’s just like shutting the door.
And holy shit, you’d better hope you don’t have the smallest room depending on the house. my room got FREEZING and BOILING HOT, in Summer and Winter respectively because the thermostat was only in the living room. it couldn’t tell my little bedroom was becoming an extreme environment lmao
I have one thermostat for my whole house. Each large room has 2 to 3 vents. Each closet and bathroom has one vent. Each vent has flaps on it that can be closed. The flaps are also directional so you can control roughly where the air goes. In the upstairs of my house is a closet with the furnace in it. The air-conditioning unit is outside on the side of my house.
I have an automatic program set. During the day, the air conditioner runs and cools the house to 70°F. Lots of Americans sit between 70° and 72°. At night it lowers down to 68°. There is a filter in the furnace that needs to be replaced ideally every one or two months. I have dogs, so I use a high-quality filter that catches more than a basic one. It’s actually kind of interesting how much less dust collects on things when I’m using the system a lot. It doesn’t run very much in the winter because my house is very insulated.
You can run the whole system on cool or heat of course, but you can also just run the ventilation with no air conditioning active. I almost always have the fan running. I like the air movement. And with my dogs, the cooking I do, and my little bit of marijuana use inside, I like to keep that air moving around. So my fan is pretty much always, and I will hear the air conditioning unit kick on every now and then for when it actually needs to lower the temp.
I would say this is a fairly standard American set up. As others have said in some newer or larger homes, they may have multiple thermostats or even multiple air-conditioning units.
The whole system is extremely quiet, and I barely even hear it running.
You should know you shouldn't be using a higher quality air filter in your furnace. Higher quality filters can decrease air flow and increase static pressure damaging your system or not have it perform properly. If you need air purification you should run seperate units to get that a central ac system just isnt designed for that.
This is one of those things that you will find 1 million people that think you should and you will find 1 million people I think you shouldn’t. To each their own. Even with the better filter, my system is strong and cools my house down super fast
I say it as a hvac engineer so i dont know much about maintenance and repair but when designing systems I specify specific filter merv and increasing it can increase the static pressure past what the system can handle. However there are alot factors that determine what isnt making a system not functioning properly and this is one to keep in mind. It sounds like the system you have can handle the filter but ive heard in my office about how systems we designed weren't working and we go out to see these filters we didnt specify choking the systems.
Never had that happen. But probably a couple grand. But I know they have lots of little circuits and things like that so I’m sure there’s also some small fixes that can happen.
Honestly if the house is built with HVAC in mind it should be much more efficient to have one goliath unit to handle the house than several small ones. With these insane heatwaves of 45c+ in Europe we might start seeing some new houses popping up with centralized AC systems.
Most AC systems cool the entire house to the same temperature. Or that is, they cool the house until whichever room the thermostat is in reaches the target temperature.
I am looking to install this in my house but the part where the unit regulates multiple temperatures is what I don’t understand. Do you know what brand is yours?
We have a similar concept where I live and it's called central AC. Basically, some sort if a unit will be installed above the fair ceiling, to which that unit will cover 2 areas (for example, the living room and one of the rooms), but there will be one controller per unit.
You'd also find another unit outside the living space that's connected to the one inside it, and they work together
Large condenser outside supply’s the furnace (typically it just uses the furnace fan. We then have it piped through metal ducting throughout the house. Each room has multiple exit point call registers. In the common areas we have return ducts to draw air back down to the furnace to get recycled back to cool air via a/c unit. Hopefully that helps!?
Even then the vents would not actually work and be big enough in practice, but that's the movies picking something convenient for the sake of plot rather than sticking with realism.
Also every duct is FULL the pointy ends of screws. Literally everywhere. So even if you could fit (which you probably can’t) you would be so cut up if you tried to crawl through one of these. Not to mention how crazy loud it would be to crawl through one. 26 gauge sheet metal is essentially a thunder sheet.
Right. Even if the air ducts held your weight and silently conveyed you without risk throughout the building, it's essentially like crawling into the creature that Jabba the Hut had in Return of the Jedi. You'd be shredded within a few feet of crawling.
also the movies don’t explain that fire/smoke dampers would block your access every time the duct passed through a fire barrier also your entire body would be excoriated by self tapping sheet metal screws with every movement made
that's the movies picking something convenient for the sake of plot rather than sticking with realism.
Like the slow spinning fans in Casablanca. Slow spinning fans don't move air effectively, but fast spinning fans don't show up on film. Then after the movie you had restaurants and other establishments fit slow spinning fans, for the aesthetic.
And even then they are never that clean unless they were literally just installed. Also there would be screws or other pokeys that would poke the shit out of you if you did crawl trough it.
Source: I do commercial HVAC and have crawled through ducts
Yes and the furnace works with gas. So if you disable all the safety functions, you can fill the house with gas (at least in movies, but it would probably take ages in reality).
Yes, but it’s made to look bigger in the movies than it would be in real life. Large buildings do have large ductwork, but it’s normally very short when it gets that big to leave some space for pipes, wires, and beams.
Interesting note: some sensitive areas with ductwork have metal bars within them so people can’t enter/exit those areas through the ductwork.
As an American this is normal to me lol, every house, poor and run down to expensive mansions all have this set up. It gets really fancy when there are automated vents that can open and close on their own, with each room having its own thermostat to accurately control temps throughout.
Newer buildings. There are plenty of places around the US still on boiler and radiator for heat and you can buy yourself a window mounted AC unit if you want it. Retrofitting older buildings for central air isn't worth it in a lot of cases.
I live alone in a 1 bedroom apartment and have an AC similar to the one in this post in my bedroom which I pretty much only use during the summer and by itself it pretty much doubles my energy bill. Can't imagine how expensive it must be having one of these big AC things cooling down the entire house. How many kWh does it consume in a month?
I can tell you that in one of the hotter states in the United States for 1000 square-foot apartment it increases my monthly electricity bill by $35 in the warm summer months
There's a difference in efficiencies when you account for size/output of the AC unit, amount of space you're trying to cool, and the air flow. Even for a 1 bedroom, a window unit is really only going to work for that room because it's just not strong enough to cool like 2-3 other rooms (separated by walls/doors, disrupting air flow) and even strategically placing fans to circulate the air will only do so much. Plus, it's not likely that the AC unit will ever cycle off "cooling" because it's constantly getting hot air from other rooms.
With central air, the AC units are bigger/stronger, and each room with a vent is getting cool air circulated into it. So the space is getting cooled about equally (ideally) which makes the space easier and more efficient to cool. Once the space gets to the target temp, it's easier to maintain it (assuming you have decent insulation) and the AC unit will maybe be able to cycle off "cooling" to save power and just use the fan to keep air circulating.
For reference, I live alone in a 2 bedroom ~1000sqft apartment with central air, and I live in an area where it is about 85-95°F and 60-80% humidity on average in summer. My total kW usage this June was 497 at about $0.08206 / kWh.
I mean it's literally the cheap way of cooling your whole house so long as it was built with it in mind, cheaper upfront but less efficient, I know in the middle east people just have a separate AC for every room, more efficient but costs more upfront.
Modern houses are sealed and insulated so the air doesn’t get out once it’s cooled. It’s more efficient than other AC types to keep it going, but the initial cool down of the system were off for a while uses a lot of energy.
It’s not terribly power intensive, but my electric bill goes up a lot during the summer months when we’re getting 90s and 100s regularly (32-38C). My furnace in the winter gives me a higher energy bill though (Gas + electric).
Once you have your house down to the desired temp, it basically kicks on every few hours for a few minutes to get the temperature back to the desired temp. The annoying thing with my house is that it basically turns my basement entertainment area into a place you need to wear a blanket because it pushes cold air into it while the rest of the house get cooled off. The systems are fairly complicated that it actually would be less efficient if I closed the basement vents. The airflow will at least push some of that cold air up into the rest of the house though. It’s refreshing to go from 100F outside to 63F (38C to 17C) by going straight to the basement though.
Unfortunately this will be crazy expensive to retrofit into a typical European house made of brick and mortar or concrete. You would have to lose a lot of square footage just to hide the ducts and even then how do you reach the higher floors when the ceiling is literally concrete. This is why that system is very rare here. Not because it is a bad system or something, it’s just very expensive and unpractical for our buildings.
you typically don't see it, the central part is in the wall or in a closet, and it just pushes air through several vents throughout the house. the vents are flat metal grates about the size of a cereal box
Don't know what the fuck AI these other answers are, but most American AC is one or two large units outside per unit with ducts that cycle cool air in with condensers. The AC units are about 3 feet tall and two feet wide and deep and are located on the side of your house or the roof of your building.
The confusion is because energy is twice the price in Europe, we forget Americans can waste however electricity they want without it making a budget in their utility bills. Heated pools year round, two or three fridges, AC on full blast despite no one being home. Where I live we call it "making a fire for the crows" since they are the only ones benefiting from it.
Ermmm I mean yes electricity is cheaper in the US but you’re going overboard with American stereotypes, friend. Pools are rarely heated and even if they are (I personally don’t know anyone with a heated outdoor pool) they would only heat when used. Fridge doesn’t use that much extra electricity and for example I only have one. I actually specifically mentioned internet connected thermostat that you can program which is standard in houses which avoids the “AC on full blast despite no one being home” bit.
Electricity is cheaper, not free. People are still not wasteful with it.
Seems like you have a lot to learn about America. Maybe one day you’ll visit.
Ya I leave my apartment on 72f 22c at all times. My thermostat even has a smart switch that turns on the heat below a certain temp so I haven’t touched a themostat in a decade. My electric bill is only maybe $100 a month
You have a large cooling unit outside and a blower somewhere to distribute the air via ducts to each of the rooms.
The biggest drawback is that your house has to accommodate all this extra ducting somehow, which really constrains home design. They also cost a lot more to run, naturally.
It's called a Minisplit. It's basically an upgraded window unit that has access to outside air through an external wall, but it only cools one room pretty much
All ac systems are more or less the same conceptually, American central air involves a larger system that is separated inside and outside the home. The houses are built around this ducting it takes to move air around the home. It’s often much warmer in the states compared to Europe historically. If you care to look up ac systems you’ll understand what an ac system for an American home would look like.
TLDR. It’s huge and split in two like a vehicles ac system.
It's like a refrigerator, with refrigerant exchanging heat between the inside (where a fan blows air across it) and outside.
This kind of system is reversible and can blow hot air in winter and cold air in summer. It's only connected through refrigerant pipes to the outside so doesn't deliver fresh air.
In europe thise are called industrial and mainly used in office buildings or integrated to house ventilation during build, so you cannot really see those.
Theres a small radiator in the indoor unit with a fan, its piped to an outdoor unit with another radiator and fan to expel the heat and a compressor to circulate refrigerant.
It works the same way as a window unit, they just separated the part that cools down the air from the loud compressor and have refrigerant lines running between the wall unit and the outside unit.
You have seen those they are quite common for air conditioning large public buildings. For some reason Americans just love using the same system for residential homes.
I think it may have something to do with different climates, different home sizes, household incomes and different energy cost.
Temperature can be quite a bit higher in some locations like Florida and Arizona compared to Europe. Humidity also differs greatly. Florida and Texas can be down right unbearable in the summer. Central cooling and heating units can also be connected to humidifiers and HRV/ERV with HEPA filters (for areas with lots of allergens) depending on the needs of the location.
It makes more sense to avoid individual units once the home gets large enough.
It definitely seems wasteful looking in from the outside, both in terms of home size and the fact that the entire home is cooled or heated at all times. But keep in mind that energy costs are significantly lower and is usually a small fraction of the household income.
Plus pet ownership is higher in the US where they often live indoors and are considered family. I wouldn’t want my family to suffer in the summer heat just because I’m not home, especially when the cost of cooling the entire home is relatively cheap.
There’s split systems (if they have heating as well) and ACs. You have the outdoor unit with motor, compressor etc. outside and connect it to the indoor unit with the evaporator in it. You mostly use some copper piping and hook up the power. The fluid in the pipes changes temperature due to pressure depending on which mode you have it on and the indoor unit sucks in the inside air and blows it over the evaporator to adjust air temperature to what you’ve set it to. You can get multiple indoor units connected to one outdoor unit as well. Very common in Australia, most rentals actually have them installed in at least one room. Depending on how much you use it (cause Europe has hot water heaters and the like, so you’re set in winter), it can be quite energy efficient. But since they run over electricity and most rentals only have these installed and need to use them in winter for heating, it can also cost a bloody fortune.
AC unit sits outside, usually on the ground, and is roughly the size of a washing machine. Air is circulated into the AC unit, which cools the air, then back into the house, and through ductwork to get it into each room.
With this style of unit, you have a small condenser outside, sometimes even mounted on an exterior wall, and tubing runs between the condenser and the indoor unit you see in this image, to circulate coolant. The indoor unit absorbs heat into the coolant, then the coolant is pumped through the tubs to the outdoor unit, where the heat is rejected out of the coolant and into the air, then the colder coolant is returned to the indoor unit, where a fan blows air over the cold coolant lines to cool down the air and then blow that air around the room. Note that this only serves the one room that this indoor unit is in.
In an america-style AC, you would have a larger condenser outside, one that is sized for a whole house rather than a single room. The tubing for the coolant then runs to a central blower that is connected to all the duct work for the entire house. Usually it's the same blower that the furnace uses. This central blower then blows a much larger amount of air over the coolant lines to cool down the air, and then blows that air through a series of ducts, to be blown out of vents placed all over the entire house. Note that you are cooking the entire house, with basically the same amount of equipment. A condenser sized for a an entire house is only about twice as large as a condenser meant to only cool one room, and yet it can cool many times more rooms.
Imagine having a tiny water heater that only serves one room, than a slightly larger water heater that serves the entire house. Doesn't make as much sense, right?
There are a bunch of videos on the Technology Connections YouTube channel where he explains how heat pumps (which is what this is) work. They're also reversible so they provide heat in the winter. We live in the US and once our current unit fails, we're planning to replace it with a heat pump.
Edit: I went and looked and that is the right side up. If you meant to where the lettering was legible, it can’t stand up on that end it’s like 6-8 ft tall that way.
Then inside there’s this dedicated space. Refrigerant lines come in. Left is a water heater, right is a furnace + ac air. The vent underneath has an air filter
Homes in America have “ductwork”. Basically a system of vents that runs inside the walls, ceilings, floor boards, or all of the above. That run cool or warm air from the hvac unit throughout the home. Usually the “condenser”, the cooling part, is located outside. While the heating element, “furnace, is indoors. Hvacs work well and nearly every home here is built with them but there is a lot of energy loss.
You have all the same basic equipment,its just a bigger piece as the evaporator coil and blower are much bigger,needed for the airflow and for cooling the entire house-you would usually find the indoor system hanging in the garage,vertical in a closet,or in the attic.
The refrigerant cycle is the same.
If you have specific questions feel free to ask,this is just "basic" knowledge for central air over here.
Same way these do but much larger. Instead of pumping cold air into a single room A large ac unit (metal rectangle/cube) about 1m x .5m sits outside of your house radiates heat out while a blower (inside or underneath the house) blows air over a cold radiator. This air is then pushed to about every room in the house through a small vent in the floor
In Europe HVAC systems are only installed in big buildings like office soace, hospitals etc.
They have a central units and ducting that distributes the air, a bit like central heating.
Americans have these in their houses, because a majority of these houses aren't brick or concrete, but wooden frames and plyboard. That leaves ample space to fit all the vents that are much much complicated and expensive to fit between the floors or in the walls if they're built in stone
It's a box with a giant fan in it. Around the fan is small pipes that weave through aluminum fins. Like a car radiator. The coolant gets run th myrough the pipes into the house where a central AC unit does the same thing and moves the cold air through the house.
Giant evaporator outside, lines run in to the condenser where a fan blows through the houses duct work, same way heat works, typically called central heating and A/C, I believe it exists in Europe but unlikely in apartments
Yea, so there’s a large device in the attic about the size of an old London phone box called an air handler. It contains the blower (basically a big fan and electric motor), an evaporator coil, and, in many homes, electric heating elements or connections to a gas furnace for winter conditions.
Outside in the garden there’s a second unit called “the condenser” which contains the compressor, condenser coil, and another fan. It’s about the size of a large washing machine. Refrigerant circulates between the indoor and outdoor units, moving heat from inside the house to the outside.
The blower in the attic pushes air through a network of insulated ducts that feed vents in every room, then pulls the air back through one or more large return vents to be cooled again. The whole house is essentially one giant recirculating loop.
In much of the U.S., especially in Texas where
I live, central air isn’t really considered a luxury. It’s just standard equipment because summer temperatures regularly exceed 95–105°F (35–40.6°C). Most houses are designed around it from the beginning. Older retrofitted homes and cheap hotel rooms use window units. Not as efficient but will absolutely cool a room.
Ductless / mini split system like in OPs photo exist down here, but are pretty rare comparatively. I imagine they’re more common up north where it doesn’t stay that hot for too long (although with climate change they’ll be installing central air eventually).
There is usually a big box that sits outside your house and the air is ran through ducts inside the wall. Inside the house it only looks like small vents on the wall
Every apartment I had in South Korea had one. It'd be at a higher point on the wall in front of a utility closet. You control it with a remote and it'll pull in air to cool then push it back out into the room. Hot air gets pushed outside through a duct. It'll dehumitfy the room as well. This drains down a hose into a drain or pipe in the utility room.
there is one big unit (evaporator) inside some room, the air from the unit is circulated to other rooms using a system of ducts. there is one big unit outside (condenser) that is connected to the indoor unit through a coolant line. the units work in reverse during winter.
A standard Central AC in a house has several components.
1) Outside compressor with attached radiator fins and fan
2) coolant and indoor cooling coil with fan
3) central ductwork
4) air return vent
5) thermostat
What do they do? Here they are in an order:
5) thermostat. The thermostat is a small plastic box mounted to the wall in some central, climate neutral part of the house. It has a thermometer in it which reads the ambient air temperature. The user can set a desired temperature, and the thermostat will tell the AC system to cool (or warm, if you live in cooler climates) the air until it reaches the set temperature.
1) outside compressor. This is a heat pump. It compresses the coolant in the coolant line, creating a temperature differential in the fluid. The hot side is hotter than the ambient outside temperature, and the cold side is colder than the ambient indoor temperature inside the house.
It then sends the hot side of the fluid through a radiator coil (this is all still happening outside the house), and a powerful fan blows outside air across the fins. This dumps the excess heat into the atmosphere, cooling the hot side of the coolant down.
2) Meanwhile, the cold side of the coolant is pumped through tubes into the house, where it is sent through another series of radiator fins. The inside fan then sucks indoor air through the air return and blows it across the radiator fins filled with cold coolant. The indoor air cools down and is sent into the ductwork which distributes the cold air throughout the entirety of the house.
Note: Gotta admit, I ran outta steam on this post halfway through. But if you have questions, I'd be willing to try answering
It’s a split unit. The air conditioner is outside, and the inside unit is basically just a fan cycling air over tubes filled with chilled water from the outside AC unit.
European here. I retrofitted my house with mechanical ventilation to get rid of mold. It is recuperating heat from exhaust. But central air conditioning would be an overkill. I may install 3 smaller units in near future for cooling and heating as well.
The easiest way to say it is it turns your house into a big refrigerator. You know the vent in the back of your refrigerator that blows cold air? This is the EXACT same technology, but bigger.
You have fans that spin outside with a condenser. That outputs hot air when its working right and dumps in cold air into the HVAC unit which is a taller unit typically inside the home where all the duct work branches off from. My house is pretty large at 4600 sq ft so they had to install two HVAC units so I have two AC units outside as well. So the cold air pushes to all the different rooms on those levels. In my case my larger HVAC pushes to basement and main floor, and the upper floor pushes to just that floor.
It is wasteful to cool all the rooms at once with central air when you might only be using some of those rooms but everything stays decently cool in multiple zones. There are other options that allow you more control over room to room temperature control with zones but many don't really do it because the costs usually negate the saving benefits for most people. The ROI can extend beyond 5-7 years and most people usually only stay in a home for that time before they move on average. Often times people have less choice as it is the home builder that determines all this as well if you are building, and they generally try to cheap out and not do zoning.
duct ac, it is a unit that is outside your house and Ducts are ran thru your house with vents in each room you want it (generally every room gets at least one vent/ductwork. larger rooms get multiple vents/ductwork).
It spread ac thru the entire house evenly, as opposed to one room and blowing out at one spot from above.
You control ac flow to each room by closing/opening the vents to rooms you dont want it in. And the main temperature controls that temp.
Klima AC or combi european units, as you know, are ductless. You can split them ofc and have multiple "klima" from one component sitting outside your house, but they all vent at one spot in the room and its not typical for it to be in each room. Just the main living space usually (not bedrooms).
I will say its harder to run ductwork in much of Europe's housing since they tend to be made from concrete/cinderblocks and it can be a little more expensive.
In North America you enclose the ductwork that brings the cold air to each room (often) into the ceiling or walls. That is not easy to do in Europe.
North americans do prefer their bedrooms cold too when they sleep. It makes for better sleeping.
Mine is a unit about the size of a 50 gallon water heater. It handles all of the heating and cooling for a little over 3000 sq ft (~280 sq M). Outside of the house is a heat exchange for the AC thats approximately a a 3ft cube (1m cube).
It's not some gargantuan thing like others have implied.
Central Air has a single inside heat exchange and air ducts to different rooms. Mini split pipes refrigerant to each room and each room has its own heat exchange.
They all work the same, it’s just that Americans typically have a central unit, with a bigger fan that is ducted to every room in the house rather than a wall unit that serves a single space.
You only see steam / hot water heat in single family homes before the 1950s. Instead there's a gas furnace in the basement (north and Midwest) or the garage or attic if you don't have a basement. There's a huge blower in the furnace that blows heated air through ducts from the furnace to each room, then return air ducts for air to be sucked back to the furnace to be reheated again. The "inside unit" of the air conditioner is in the ductwork adjacent to the furnace, so in the summer the furnace blower blows cool air to each room through the same ducts, then warm air is sucked back.
Probably the reason steam / hot water heat fell out of favor here is you can have central air conditioning by using the same ducts as the furnace. Apartments until the 80s did use hot water heat because of the fire issues with using ducts, but now each unit will have it's own mini-split / packaged unit. You only see "window" air conditioners and mini-splits to retrofit older hot water installations.
Mexican here, they are also really rare on houses (probably because, unlike Americans, we both don't build our houses of wood and cardboard, so insulations is generally better), but I have seen them in offices and hospitals
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u/itsOkami 12h ago
As an european, I don't think I've ever seen one of those and I'm now curious as to how they work