After weeks of bids and then more weeks waiting our turn for an installation crew to come and install our new air conditioner at the hottest nastiest time of the year, it's finally in and working.
For fun I set it to 68 and it throttled up and chilled the place down to 68 and then kept it there. It felt like a deep freeze in here. I turned it up to 72 and it slowly let itself slow down until it obtained 72, it used every bit of cold energy in the system on it's way toward the higher thermostat setting. The old system would just shut off and waste all that cold energy in the lines.
The new model is variable speed with 750 levels from low to high. Both the inside air handler and the outdoor condensing unit go up and down in speed, in perfect synchronization. Overall it's much quieter than our previous 20 year old Lennox system.
Our old air conditioner had two speeds, on and off, it sucked 4200 watts when it was running. I can check the power consumption on our digital power meter. That's right around $1.76 cost per hour of run time in Lancaster California or 42-cents per hour here in Melbourne Florida.
The new system has 750 speeds so it has proportionate power consumption depending on how fast it is running, higher speed = more power draw, lower speed = less power used.
I've been checking on it periodically and tracking the power usage. With the new system running at the loudest speed I've heard the current draw was 1326 watts. That was when I was running it to get down to 68. That's 2874 watts less than the old system. That is equal to a savings of $1.20/hour in Lancaster California or 29-cents per hour here in Melbourne Florida. More importantly, it's a 68% reduction in power consumption.
This is all preliminary data. The system is set to run a programmed cycle tomorrow, I'll track power usage during the peak hot time of the day which typically occurs between two and three PM, it will be interesting see how the numbers vary over the course of the day. So far it looks like the higher efficiency unit will definitely pay for itself in electricity savings over the projected life of the hardware. That would be cool (pun intended).
