Gas Air Conditioning?

[joeekaitis]

1964/1965 New York World's Fair

 

The restaurant (Festival '64/Festival '65) was gas air-conditioned, of course.

 

The name of the pavilion suggests beans, cauliflower and broccoli where featured on the menu.

http://nywf64.com/fesgas01.shtml

 

[askolover]

Still available

Robur and Servel still sell them.  Back in the 90's Trane had them.

https://gasairconditioning.com/market-segments/residential/robur-gas-fired-air-conditioning/
https://www.roburcorp.com/references/installations/residential_home

https://gasairconditioning.com/market-segments/residential/robur-gas-fired-air-conditioning/

 

[kb0nes]

One of the houses up the hill on Tonquil St in Beltsville had a gas absorption central AC unit. It may have been your house Tom, or a couple doors down.

I remember John and Jeff hauling the outdoor unit down the the hill on the old trusty Craftsman hand truck, that thing was a heavy beast, the axle of the 2-wheeler suffered. I also recall that one of the coils was leaning on John's white Datsun 510 in the driveway and the heat of the Sun drove some of the fluid out of the coil onto the paint staining the car.

Amazing what the mind remembers 50 years on when I can't recall why I walked into the next room!

 

[panthera]

Some good reasons back then, still some today

Gas air-conditioning offered some advantages to offset the inefficient use of energy.
1) Lots of middle-class folks had gas but not 240VAC.
2) The heat pump/AC disasters had hurt the reliability ratings of compressor AC.
3) Properly built units were highly reliable, more so than the compressor units of that era.
4) Super quiet compared to early compressor units.

Of course, today's absorption units are far more efficient than back then. When you can run one off of the 'waste' heat found in many industrial situations, they are more efficient, by far. For domestic use, only a few are still installed new around
here and that's only because we have a company which makes the and distributes them in the area.

Probably their advantage for the utility companies was that they saved having to build more electric generation plants.

 

[circlew]

Occasionally I visit an Amish bakery about 50 miles from here. It is always nice and cool in there in Summer. They have gas air conditioning, and their refrigeration equipment also operates on propane.

 

[dermacie]

we had GAS air conditioning made by Carrier

Our 1960s built home had GAS air conditioning for over 22 years. When the furnace which was also Carrier forced air developed a crack it was replaced by a conventional electric air conditioner.

 

[iheartmaytag]

We had a house with an ARkla Servel unit

It kept the house very nicely, when it was working. Unfortunately at the time we bought the house it was at the end of it's life cycle. We ended up installing a high efficiency electric unit, but first had to have a new service installed to handle the 240V and then run the lines to the AC unit outside. Total install in 1981 was $7K.

To have replaced with another gas unit would have been close to $4K, and the efficiently was no where close to the Ruud unit.