Tag Archives: air conditioning

Summer Cooling Tips & Tricks

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summer cooling tips

Summer heat is great on the beach. It’s not so great at home, at the office, or when you’re mowing the backyard. Rely on MrCool’s patented (not really) summer cooling tips and tricks to beat the summer heat without breaking your bank account.

Summer Cooling Tips & Tricks

The simplest and most effective way to beat summer heat is with a MrCool air conditioner like the DIY or the Oasis. I mean, obviously. If you are looking for non-mechanical ways to stay cool, we do have some suggestions.

Close the Blinds

Natural illumination is nice. It can also make your rooms a lot hotter in summer. If you want to keep cool without the a/c, close your curtains and draw the blinds. Believe it or not, blocking hot summer sunlight will help you stay comfortable.

Appreciate Your Fans

We appreciate our fans and you should too. No, we’re not talking about that weird guy at the library who always asks for your autograph. That guy is just crazy, and insanity does not reduce temperatures. We’re talking about ceiling fans and box fans. They won’t actually lower the temperature, but the air flow will make your feel a lot more comfortable. Fans, of course, use electricity, but not at the same rate as most conventional HVAC systems.

Stay Hydrated

Your body is quite efficient at cooling itself. Yeah, sweating isn’t exactly as comfortable as cool, crisp conditioned air from a MrCool Advantage, but sweat does work. The key is to stay hydrated. Not only will that help you stay cool, but it’s simply a matter of health and safety. If you get too hot and you’re not properly hydrated, you are at risk of overheating. That’s bad. Keep a glass of water handy, and, y’know, drink the water on occasion. The drinking part is key.

Summer Air Conditioning – Are You Ready?

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summer air conditioning

Summer air conditioning season has already arrived for many Americans. If you’re one of those lucky enough to still be enjoying mild weather, don’t worry. You’ll soon be sweating your butt off just like the rest of us.

With that in mind, is your air conditioner ready for high summer temperatures?

Summer Air Conditioning – What You Need to Know!

First, if you don’t have an air conditioner, now is the time to buy one. Don’t wait until you’re miserable. Get one today, and get it installed before you have to suffer. We, of course, recommend the MRCOOL DIY, but, then again, we’re horribly biased.

Let’s suppose thought that you already have an air conditioner. Is your air conditioner ready for summer? Are you confident it’s going to work when you turn it on? If it doesn’t, do you have a plan?

You’ll be a lot less sweaty answering these questions now.

Clean Your Condenser

The air conditioner condenser is the noisy part of the system that sits outside your house. It connects to air ducts and the air handling system. It also is exposed to a lot of wind, rain, and debris like grass clippings, insects, sticks, etc. All that dust and debris can get stuck in the condenser vents. Which is a bad thing. Just like you don’t want gunk clogging up your lungs, you don’t want gunk clogging up your condenser.

Clean out your condenser before your start the unit up this year. You can buy condenser cleaning sprays if you want. However, simply spraying the condenser from the inside out with a water hose, then letting it dry will make a big difference.

Annual Check Up

Are you a heating, ventilating, and air conditioning professional? No? You might want to think about hiring one to come out and give your air conditioner a quick pre-summer maintenance check then. A regular maintenance inspection is a good way to spot small problems that might develop into big problems if left unfixed. Yes, inspections are not free, but they can save you a lot of money down the road.

They can also save you a lot of sweat and tears. If your unit goes out at the height of summer heat, you will probably have to suffer a couple of hot days before a technician can get out to you. A pre-summer checkup goes a long way toward preventing that.

Check Your Filters

Summer air conditioning isn’t just about the outside condenser. You also need to make sure everything is going good on the inside, and by that I mean your air filters. When was the last time you checked them? When was the last time you changed them? If you don’t know that answer to either question, you need to do, at minimum, the first one today. A dirty air filter reduces energy efficiency and makes your whole system work a lot harder than it should. This costs you money while it heightens your risk of catastrophic mechanical failure.

Enjoy Your Summer!

Reliable summer air conditioning is the best way to make it through the hottest season of the year without a lot of sweat and hassle. Follow our simple steps, and you’ll go a long way towards ensuring your comfort until the season starts to turn. Of course, if you need a new air conditioner, you know where to find one.

I’m talking about us; buy a MrCool!

Air Conditioning The Martian

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air conditioning the martian

I am super excited about The Martian coming out this weekend. It looks awesome! I could gush a few thousand words for the movie, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll share some speculation. I was reading about the hard science aspects of the movie, and I got to wondering whether or not it will delve into how the stranded astronaut stayed cool on the surface of Mars. Basically, how would air conditioning The Martian work?

Air Conditioning The Martian

Space is cold. Okay, it’s not so much ‘cold’ as it completely lacks any kind of heat. That’s a problem NASA tackled a long time ago. They had to or any astronauts we sent into low-Earth orbit would freeze to death in a matter of minutes.

Which is bad.

Let’s get back to air conditioning The Martian. The astronauts sent to explore Mars would use the same HVAC tech NASA always has on the way to the Red Planet, but what about when they got to the surface? Would they need something really high tech or could one of our MrCool (quite terrestrial) air conditioners work?

The answer is kind of interesting.

Conventional Air Conditioning on Mars

Earth-based air conditioners work by sucking the heat out of your house and dumping it outside via what’s commonly known as the refrigeration cycle. Technically speaking, there’s no reason why the refrigeration cycle wouldn’t work on any planet with an atmosphere. An air conditioner exactly like the one you’ve got running inside your house could, in theory, run on an alien world.

It would not, however, do much good on Mars.

Air conditioning the Martian through conventional means is right out the window. The reason isn’t fundamental – it’s temperamental. Mars is really, really, really cold. Yes, the temperature on the Martian equator can get up to about 70 degrees on a summer day. That’s decently warm, and your air conditioner would work in that temperature range. Maybe even on Mars.

The problem would arise when night fell. The Martian atmosphere is about 100 times thinner than our own, so Mars doesn’t have much of a thermal blanket. Heat retention is not a thing there. Which means the regular nightly temperature even on the Martian equator can hit -100 degrees. Yeah, you wouldn’t need an air conditioner then, and if you tried to operate one it would immediately freeze.

An energy efficient heat pump wouldn’t work well either. There are heat pumps that can operate at around 0 degrees, but the HVAC industry has yet to build one to operate at -100. You might say there’s not a market for that yet.

But, who knows, maybe one day in the sort-of-near future, HVAC companies will be building air conditioners to keep you cool during your vacation to the Red Planet.

Not anytime soon though.