Big Ideas #12

With the summer heat right around the corner, my mind has been focusing on air conditioning. For those of you that live where the summers are mild enough that you don't need it, you won't understand how important it is when the temperature is 95 degrees and the humidity is above 75%. I had an idea that a good way to control the high cost associated with air conditioning would be to direct the air conditioning only where it was needed. What I thought would be cool would be to have individual air conditioning units for each room so that only the rooms that needed it would get it. "Wait a minute", you say, "Don't window air-conditioners do that?" Yes, but they're ugly, and not very efficient because they don't usually have a thermostat. What I'm talking about is a unit that would fit in the space above the room and would exhaust the cool air through existing air-conditioning registers. It would, of course, have to be connected to a main compressor (or two) . The compressor(s) would run at a variable rate depending on how many of the individual units were on at the same time and the return air would be fed back to be cooled through a very small aperture rather than the large, single return that you find in current systems. The same system could be used for forced air heating only you'd want the air to come out closer to the floor so that it would heat the room as it rose. It's been proven time and time again that point of use systems save money and are more responsive. Look at point of use water heaters. They product hot water instantly and you don't have a big tank of hot water that you have to keep hot whether you need it or not.
You could even take this to the next level and use an entirely new sort of refrigeration by utilizing Peltier cooling. The technology involved applies current to a coated plate and because of the circuitry involved, the plate has a cold side and a hot side. Blow air past the cold side and you have air conditioning, the hot side, heating.