The term climate control is more than just air conditioning:  it is the alteration of the mini-climate in your room, such as that in your home or in your office, to a form more suited to your own particular preferences.  It can involve heating or cooling of the ambient air, ventilation, humidification if the air is too dry, and dehumidification if it is too moist.  Although the modern domestic equipment used to achieve this can use fairly advanced technology, the concept itself is not new.

Believe it or not, when they weren’t out conquering the world, the ancient Romans used climate control to keep themselves cool during their hot summers.  They achieved this by diverting water from aqueducts to circulate around the walls of their homes.  Other civilizations, such as the Persians, achieved the same thing by the use of windcatchers, a system that involved towers at the top of buildings that captured the wind and diverted it down and around the house creating pressure gradients that drew in more air that passed over cool water.  As the water evaporated, the air was cooled even further.  These were suitable for small domestic rooms as well as for larger structures.

The Chinese used massive rotary fans to cool themselves in the early part of the first millennium, which could be said to be the first incidence of air conditioning as we know it today.  However, it was chemistry that really provided the answer to efficient cooling systems for large volumes of air.  Michael Faraday found that liquefied ammonia had a cooling effect on air when it evaporated.  If the ammonia was compressed and liquefied, the cooling effect was even greater when the ammonia was allowed to expand. This is, in fact, the principle behind the modern domestic refrigerator and air conditioners.

However, it wasn’t until 1902 that Willis Haviland Carrier invented the first real electric air conditioner. His invention was designed to control not only room temperature, but also humidity within a pressroom, where excessive humidity or lack of it could cause the paper to curl, and heat could cause the presses to expand and lose their register.  Four years later Stuart W. Cramer of North Carolina first used the term ‘air conditioning’ in his patent for a system that used the evaporation of water in air to cool textile plants. This system is now known as evaporative cooling.

The technology continued and domestic air conditioning and climate control boomed in the 1950s, utilising the principal of compression and expansion of gases, and Freon (chlorofluorocarbon) superseded ammonia and methyl chloride in 1928, making the whole process much safer. The situation today is the CFCs are being replaced with more environmentally friendly gases.

Climate control is now a precise science, and the ideal climate for office efficiency has been calculated to be 72F (22C).  Performance of personnel can drop by as much as 15% if this increases to 25C.  Climate control has even contributed to the architectural design of buildings, and without the concept of skyscrapers would not be viable since cannot naturally circulate round buildings so tall.

Domestic climate control, however, is mainly controlled by an air conditioning unit that also humidifies and dehumidifies the air, maintaining it at a set temperature and relative humidity. It is not only cold or heat that can make you feel uncomfortable, but also the amount of moisture in the air, as anybody living around the Great Lakes can tell you.

A Buying Guide to Climate Control Equipment.

To most people an air conditioner is something you switch on when it gets hot.  However, there is a bit more to it than that and more to climate control than just controlling the temperature of the air.  Comfort costs money, and with today’s power costs it doesn’t come cheap.  So you will want to get the best you can for what you pay, and will not want to pay for more equipment than you need.  Here are a few pointers:

1.  Size
Think of what you are cooling.  Is it just one room or the whole house/, or perhaps somewhere in between.  If you choose a unit too small for the volume of air involved, then you will never cool it down and the unit will run continuously all day long.  If your equipment is too large, then you will continually be switching it off because your room will become too cold.  Continuous off and on operation is also costly.  Work out the volume of air you have to cool by measuring the dimensions of each room that you want to cool, and find a unit suitable for that volume.