Condensation would be a huge problem. Put a cold glass out on a humid day and it collects a lot of condensation. Now imagine it’s a radiator dripping on your floor
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Lots of correct answers here, but this is probably the best.
The real benefit of ac is dehumidifying. That's the most important part. The cooling is a side effect of that, which does also improve comfort.
There's a very good reason that people say "but it's a dry heat".
Humidity fucking sucks. Inescapable heat, feels like you're wrapped in a soggy blanket, bleh. No thanks.
I worked at a golf course in Florida in college. People would come from much hotter places and start out walking. After 9 holes (or less) they were begging for a cart.
Spent the day in Alamogordo, New Mexico visiting White Sands desert. It was 110°F and basically no humidity. I stayed hydrated, wore a hat and sunnies and was fine. Now, where I live it is like 85-90° and 90% humidity. I feel worse in that when sitting in the shade than I did in the middle of a literal desert.
This is the most important answer. Radiators are actually used in combination with heat pumps to cool up to a few degrees Celsius in a non-condensing mode.
The problem is, it isn't really effective. To really cool down, the radiators would need to get properly cold, but that requires cold water leading to condensation everywhere. In the radiator, but also around the piping in wall cavities, where it will feed mold growth.
A/C's don't have this problem because the piping doesn't get cold and the heat exchanger (inside fan unit) gets very cold and the condensate gets captured in a drip tray and pumped away.
Here in Sweden we are now building out "remote cooling" as the direct translation would be, in addition to the decades old remote heating infrastructure we already have. It's literally dedicated warm water and cold water lines from a central location in the city (usually a heat plant, often burning garbage, now also from central coolers) to various buildings. They're properly insulated all the way, and connected to the central heating system in each building.
A building manager could hook it up to their general ventilation / A/C system to increase both heating and cooling capacity, often much more cost effective than using electricity locally for the same amount of capacity. Remote heating is already hooked up to radiators.
there are radiators with fans, blowing air through them to migitate for the condensation. that seems to work. it's obviously more expensive than normal radiators. but you can buy them and connect them to a heat pump that supports that.
Just put a drip tray on the floor with a heating element that evaporates the condensation.
Just pump it outside. There's no reason to dump a kilowatt or more into a heater strip when removing moisture from the air on a hot day makes our sweat work better, cooling us more efficiently.
Honestly I was just trying to be counterintuitive
I did this exact thing with my boiler forces air system. Piped it in the summer that when watering the lawn, I could have all the child water go thru the condenser. Worked quite well for chill air but the condensation would have destroyed the condenser I am sure and mold would have rapidly been a problem. I could produce liters of water a day easily. Was not viable.
Because cold water isn't free. If you want to create something cold, you want to be using a conpressor and at that point, you can just skip the water step and use an AC.
Yeah, if you want a single system for heating and cooling, you'd be better off getting a heat pump. It's the most energy efficient thing for both anyway, from what I've been told.
It’s the most energy efficient because you’re not using the power to produce heat; You’re just moving heat from A to B. Imagine a heating coil that is 100% efficient. For every watt of power you put in, you get one watt of heat. Now imagine being able to move heat from outside instead. For every one watt you put into the system, you can move two watts of heat into the room. It’s not using the energy to create heat, so it can actually be more efficient than something that is made to produce heat.
The issue with heat pumps is that they need latent heat to actually be able to pump heat around. As temperatures get lower and lower outside, they become less efficient at heating your house because there is less heat outside to pump into your house. At a certain point, it becomes more efficient to just use the power to directly produce heat, instead of trying to pump it around.
Most of the world doesn’t ever need to worry about that, but it can be a consideration in particularly cold areas. The tipping point for efficiency is usually around 0-10°F, so it’s not something that equatorial areas need to worry about. But up north, it becomes more and more of a consideration.
Some newer ones can operate down to -22F. I'm in a place that hits those kind of of temps so I'd want a wood stove as a backup. I guess a ground source heat pump might be a better fit around here.
For what it’s worth, heat pump manufacturers know this, and usually include a way to generate heat. My parents use a heat pump system, and it has a radiator that only turns on when the outside temperature drops below whatever the efficiency threshold is. Radiators are cheap and easy to build, so they’re not difficult to include in an existing heat pump setup.
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Heat pumps can cool this way
Hot water radiators are designed to work with temperature deltas in the 110 degree F range (target 70 room temp, 180 water temp). In the summer your temperature deltas are much tighter, you can only get to at best 32 F before the water freezes and with a target of 70 that's only 38 degrees of temperature delta trying to cool the room. They simply won't work efficiently enough for it to be worth it, not to mention being on the floor is very poor positioning for summer.
It technically would work, and in countries like Norway where you will always get cold water out of your water supply for no cost it's economically feasible.
The thing that makes it not worth the effort is similar to how you can blow away a pea at an armlength away, but you can't suck up a pea from the same distance.
Radiators when heating, expel heat not just through convection but through radiation.
When cold, they can't un-radiate, so you are left with convection. This is very slow, and won't work for the room the radiator is sized for.
To make it work, you have to heighten the convection by blowing air through it, and now you basically have a regular Air Conditioner which already exists. :)
The question is what do you do with the waste warm water.
There are A/C systems that use groundwater to cool the coils and then discharge into a pond. But obviously that only works in a place where you have ample free water and a place to dispose of it.
We do they are called air conditioners
Heat rises. Radiators are typically positioned near the floor so that heat fills the whole room. The ideal place for a heat sink would be on the ceiling. But even then, the effect would be hardly noticeable.
Better to just drink the cold water, or put it in a place where you are touching it, like a wet t-shirt around your neck.
Because it wouldn't be effective. Either you're running new water from the tap through the radiator, which is expensive and wasteful. Or you're sending the warmed water back into underground pipes to cool it off again. If you're going spend a bunch of money to bury a bunch of pipes, it's better to something that works instead.
A ground source heat pump is an effective way of getting the cold from the ground into your living space. A ground source heat pump is basically an air conditioner that has the hot part buried in the ground, and they are very efficient.
Because it uses refridgeration, its far more effective and efficient than backwards radiators.
There is a cooling strategy like this called “chilled beam” but has all the issues listed below by other posters; condensation management and power usage.
Interestingly heat spreads better than cold (I'm not an entirely reliable source for this so take it with a big grain of salt) but essentially since hot things are more energetic they have a tendency to spread but since cold things are more static, cooling is more difficult. Also radiators use blackbody radiation to emit heat via light the same way metal heats up when hot whereas there's no cold equivalent to this.
It's more because of the temperature differential. The more difference between the temperature of two objects, the faster they change temperature. A radiator with 50 degree water is ~30 degrees warmer than the room (or 80+ degrees for a steam rad), while cold water is going to be 10-15 degrees cooler than the room. Any colder and you need to use not-water so it doesn't freeze. Condensation or frost is also a big concern to avoid property damage.
Because temperature gradient. And heat radiates. Cold doesn't radiate.
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