Air Conditioner or Fan?

(Image source: http://global-cooling.co.uk)

Malaysia and the heat – we can’t get away from it

My wife have been asking me to fix an air-conditioner in our room for some time now but what I did in the end was to get a bigger fan (there is no connectors for a ceiling fan). In a way, it satisfied her – it is “cooler” at night but still we can feel the heat if we are not near the fan.

On the other hand, my friend has air conditioner for every room in his house. He even has one for the living room and he gets to sleep in a fairly cool room at night. Whilst comfort is good, he has one problem – exorbitant electricity bill! Every air conditioner easily cost him RM100 in electricity bills (that’s RM100 per room and he has 4 rooms).

For the same reason, I have opted not to fix an air conditioner in my room – the rising electricity bills. Whilst I could switch it on at night and make sure that there are no “leakages” but in the long run, it is going to be an expensive endeavour.

Just look at the power consumption between an air conditioner and a fan (calculated at watt -hours per one hour of use) :-

Window unit AC (medium size): 900
Ceiling Fab (42", on high): 75

(Source: http://michaelbluejay.com)

We take night showers to cool down the body and have thin clothes to bed. In couple of hours in the night, the temperature goes down by 2 degrees to make the room cooler. Most of the time, it does but there are times when the heat is unbearable – so another round of shower and a cold drink helps. The point is much has been saved on electricity bills.

By the way, does a fan really make the air cool? According this site, it does not but here is an interesting fact:-

Fans don't make the air cooler! They work by blowing away the envelope of warm air that surrounds your body.

As a living creature, you generate heat. A lot of it. As that heat slowly radiates away from your body, it creates a pocket of hot air that surrounds you. It's like you're being insulated by an invisible bubble of heat. What fans do is to push that hot surrounding air out of the way.

This is why blowing on hot food cools it off. It's not that your breath is especially cool, it's that you're blowing the heat off the food.

If you're sweating at all then the fan also cools you by speeding up the evaporation. So now that you know that fans don't make the air cooler, you can see that there's no advantage to leaving the fan on when you leave the room. Fans don't lower the temperature in the room at all.

So, which is better? An air Conditioner or a fan?

Both have its pros and cons, it is comfort vs saving on electricity. In times of “change your lifestyle”, saving takes precedent over comfort. It is not that bad, really.

Many ways to reduce electricity bill

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(Image source: http://www.inkycircus.com/)

Want to save the cost of electricity? Want some good tips? On the internet, the list is limitless (7, 12, 13, 65, 101 ways) -

7 Ways

12 Ways

13 Ways

65 Ways

101 Ways

But realistically the following 2 should be easy to do:-

1. Turn off the lights & other electrical appliances when it is not in use

2. Instead of air-conditioner, use normal fan

What else?

Save electricity - PC

(That's more than 1.6 tons of CO2 thrown up into the atmosphere just to keep your one single PC working! Image source: Local Cooling)

From Local Cooling:-

More than 30 billion kilowatt-hours of energy is wasted because many of us simply forget to shut down our computers when we aren't using them.

A barrel of oil contains 42 gallons and produces an average 556 kilowatt hours of electrical power. Now consider your computer. A good spec PC can use up to 200 watts per hour. If you have a CRT monitor, it adds a further 80 watts (TFT screens use less). So your system is consuming over 1 kWh of power for every four hours of normal use. If you leave your computer on 24/7, that's the equivalent of a whole barrel of oil every 90 days!

(Electricity usage on my laptop - CPU takes the most of the power usage)

Change your lifestyle – shutdown the PC if you are going for lunch (saves at least 45 minutes of electricity usage) or leaving for home.