Central Air Conditioning: Comfort and Complexity

Central air conditioning is, in a way, the ultimate form of ac, since it can use a central cooling plant to moderate the temperatures throughout an entire building. With a properly sized installation, central ac can cool everything from a small summer cabin with three rooms to massive buildings such as hospitals, military bases, airports, and the like.

When you are considering installation of air conditioning in your home, central ac is the most expensive option, but also the one that offers the best results. You can use the system to cool the whole house, or just portions of it.

Ducts and central air conditioning
The main unit of a central ac unit produces plentiful cool air through the standard methods of condensing and evaporation, but it is obviously necessary to move this cool air away from the conditioner itself and to the place where it needs to go. A simple fan arrangement such as that found in a window air conditioner will not work for a central air conditioner - instead, the air needs to be "piped" to each room of the building through a series of ducts.

Ducts are passages that connect to the air conditioner and extend through the building's structure to "vents", which are the actual openings that debouch into the rooms of your house. Obviously, it is easiest to install these ducts during initial construction, when they can be placed easily into the walls of your home while these are still being built. However, they can be added later as well, though this will naturally involve a degree of remodeling.

A good duct system is absolutely critical to the function of a central air conditioner - central air will not work without it. Therefore, you need to figure the cost of ducts into the overall cost of the system, and not just that of the main conditioning unit.

The features of central air conditioner duct systems
Since warm air must be pulled into the central unit, and cool air distributed outward from it, two duct systems are needed - supply ducts, which push cool air outward to the home, and return ducts, which suck in warm air for processing. The size and configuration of ducts must be mathematically determined according to the distance the air needs to be moved, the volume of the rooms being served by each duct branch, and so on, so professional installation help is almost always needed to create a successful central air conditioning system.

One major advantage that a central air conditioner offers is that if you include duct branches running to the outside air as well, you can keep the air fresher in your home, rather than simply reusing the same stale air over and over again.

Central air conditioners, in short, offer the ultimate comfort, freshness, and thoroughness, which comes at the price of complexity (and higher cost than more limited air conditioning options).