Ganklin wrote:
yeah it hasnt been terrible hot outsie yet. last night was actually kind of cool. i had a window open with a blanket and i felt confortable. however i need to get to loews stat and buy an AC unit for my livingroom.
however i have a bit of an issue. clearly the person in my place before me had a wondow unit in there cuz i can still see the screw holes where it was atached to the window. however the outlets are farther away than 7 feet which is what most cords seem to be. can i get an extension cord to safely run it?
other problem is the nearest outlet is also where i plug my computer in and my TV and shite are plugged into the next outlet over. think that'll be problem with the breakers if i ran the AC into one of those?
First, find out the location(s) of the different circuits in the room(s). I can gaurenty that they are only 15amp's in the room, maybe less depending on the panel capacity. As such, a heavy duty window AC may use more amps then you have available with the PC and TV. Your average PC will use 4.5 amps at full load. That does not include the monitor or networking gear. An average 50" DLP TV uses 1.3 - 1.6 amps.
The energy consumption of an AC is a huge part of its price. You will see 10,000 btu window units that use 5amps to units that use 12amps. The more efficient units almost always cost more (up front costs, but their usage costs are lower... look at your electric bill and find the cost per 1kWh, in shopping for the AC, write down the power usage, most likely given in watts. Now calculate the approximate difference in electic bill between the two units as follows: assume 8 hours AC usage per day per month in the spring, summer, fall months (using 8 hours but across 5 months as the hotter months it will be more then 8 hours a day, but the cooler months it may be less then 8 hours a day)... so figure on about 1200 hours of usage a year. (1200*(difference in watt usage between 2 units))/1000*(cost per kWh) = yearly savings by using the more efficient unit. You may find out that in 2-3 years the more efficient unit will pay for the difference in costs from its cheaper less efficient bretherin.
Do some research, because some of the more "efficient" units are not telling you the full story of their actual cooling capability and exaggerate their btu output to make the unit look more energy efficient. You almost always get what you pay for in AC's.
Add up the usages for your items and you MIGHT be able to run them all on the same circuit, but it will be EXTREMELY tight even with a super high efficient AC unit. You really should look to see if there is a second circuit in the room or nearby that you can run an extension cord to/from.
Second, get a good heavy duty extention cord...
http://www.samash.com/catalog/showitem. ... iateID=615
You can get a +50' extension if you need to run to the next room... just make sure it is rated for the full 15amps or more as the AC may be using upwards of 10amps on the run. Having some overhead is always nice.
Edit: ahhh... never thought I would use a lot of the stuff I learned about for designing and setting up a server room for dealing with home. I could probably figure out exactly what BTU unit you really need as I have all kinds of charts/graphs for the calculations as well depending on room's cubic feet, number/area of windows orientation of building, altitude, percentage of shade, number floors in building and what floor the room is located, number of people that the capacity needs to handle and average amount of electrical usage the room(s) use.
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. It hasn't been hot this summer so far, but last summer it was hell. The record inside our house was 96 degrees. The worst was when it was 93 degrees at 3 in the morning. No sleep that night.
