Solar Powered Air Conditioner

It's here! Add solar air conditioning to the ever growing family of solar products.

Waiting for a Solar Powered Air Conditioner? You're not alone and a hybrid solar powered ac unit has been designed and is already being marketed for commercial applications. Cool.

Using the sun to cool down with solar powered ac.

solar powered air conditioner

The hot and sticky wait for a solar ac will soon be over.

This is a solar appliance that makes sense.

Air conditioning requires huge draws of energy in the mid-day hours placing a strain on the power grid to keep up with demand. It just happens that solar energy is the most abundant at those very same times.

Seems like a marriage made in heaven.

Air conditioners are one of the few appliances that everyone is using at the same time placing huge loads on conventional power grids on the hottest days. It's these overwhelming loads that stress the grid system to their breaking point making rolling brownouts and blackouts necessary.

Solar powered ac products are still very limited in the marketplace. This is an area that is just now emerging and numerous micro labs and at home inventors have come up with some interesting prototypes and promising plans have been revealed by more than one company.

Using photovoltaics to feed the huge appetite of an air conditioner is a challenging task and the going has been slow in the development of a marketable product.

At the time of this writing (Nov.2008) Greencore air's solar powered air conditioning units are only available commercially as supply is limited but just the fact that it'll soon be available at the retail level makes me feel cooler already.

Hybrid solar powered air conditioner.

There's a portable unit as well as a built in model ready to go now both of which are hybrid units that'll switch to grid power to recharge batteries when the need arises. It is possible to run the units exclusively on solar power with additional solar panels and batteries if you so desire.

And while they were designing these solar powered cooling units they saved us more money by choosing to have them run on DC power. No need for an inverter to convert the energy to AC, the power can be used right from the batteries. Eliminating the need for an inverter saves money but more than that it eliminates the extra load that the inverter itself demands when in use.

Green-Energy-Efficient-Homes.com provides several options for solar powered air conditioning, and explains why what seems the obvious solution (hooking your AC up to solar panels) is probably not the best.