Gas Air Conditioning?

[launderess]

Someone want to run this by me again?



Have heard of steam being used for cooling air, and of course know about electricity, but natural gas?

 

[simpsomatic]

It's true

Yes, here in Palm Springs we once in a while find the monstrosity condenser unit on properties that have been held by matriarch families and sold as estate or trust held properties that have been neglected or abandoned for years. I believe the transfer of heat to cool and cool to heat by natural gas is the same ingenuity that was used for refrigerators that were fired with kerosene.

 

[circlew]

My former neighbors the Bates family had gas Lennox air conditioning installed in the early 60's. It eventually went bad, and was replaced by a conventional Carrier system in the 80's.

 

[tolivac]

Gas AC works like the Serval gas burner refrigerators.Use the flame instead of a compressor.

 

[maytag85]

I’ve always wondered about how gas air conditioning when I saw that one advertisement awhile back. I guess they were trying to figure out how to put natural gas to use but natural gas works better for heating and drying laundry but not so well for cooling.

 

[launderess]

Seems all rather dangerous.....



One knew about gas refrigerators, but didn't know some clever chops came up with air conditioning as well.

 

[retro-man]

When we used to visit South America in the 90's we stayed in a lot of condo resorts and most to all units had gas a/c units. Most were in a large closet and you could see the gas flames inside the unit. It was warmer in the closet but the condo cooled nicely. It was a central a/c with vents in all the rooms. I guess with these you have no outside compressors nor all the piping that goes in and outside through the walls. Others I have seen have the cooling units outside with a small metal chimney on them, with the input and output vents connected to the outside units.

Jon

 

[kimball455]

Here in Cape May, a friend had a gas AC unit for his office. I don't remember the MFG. It worked well but eventually it was replaced with a more conventional system.

 

[tomturbomatic]

Everyone thought that they would be cheaper to run because gas costs less than electricity, but that was not the case. In addition to the gas burner, they had electric pumps to move the brine solution and fans and expensive service calls. They also had little reserve capacity. Friends had a gas system and went away one summer for a few weeks. Right after they left the brine solution leaked out and the gas burner ran full blast for the entire period. They came back to a very hot house with no way of cooling it down and a big gas bill. The put in an efficient electric system and their electric bills were less than with the gas system.    

 

[frigilux]

Growing up, my next door neighbor managed the local Peoples Natural Gas office. Their house was a showcase of sorts for natural gas products. They had a gas incinerator in the garage, gas central air conditioning, a gas refrigerator and a dishwasher that used gas to the water. This would have been around 1967. The gas fridge was replaced with a conventional one within a couple of years. The dishwasher was replaced with a Maytag reverse-rack. The AC was replaced with a standard non-gas unit the year I went to college ('77). They had to stop using the incinerator when local burn laws were changed in the mid-70s.

Can you imagine calling a company "Peoples Natural Gas"? I chuckled every month when the bill arrived.

 

[jamiel]

This comes from the era of the American Gas Association trying to find more year round use for gas...Preway dishwashers, Whirlpool and Norge refrigerators, etc etc. Look up Jinx Falkenburg for several more gas ads in fabulous 1960 fashion.

 

[gizmo]

gas refrigeration works OK when you don't have other options, but it is horribly inefficient. I mean inefficient in the true meaning of the word, of comparing energy used to watts of cooling provided. Not whether it works well, that isn't efficiency.

Compare my current electric fridge with its gas equivalent:

My fridge is a cheap Haier 2 door 215 litre standard electric fridge. It is rated to use 325 kwh a year, that is less than 1 kwh a day. (I have monitored its consumption myself and it actually averages about half of that - it generally uses about 1/2 a kwh per day.) It is a few years old now, a newer fridge would use even less.

The equivalent size in the Dometic gas fridge range is the RUA8408 and that is rated to use 5.8 kwh in 24 hours. that is six times the energy consumed by the electric fridge.

They are also expensive to manufacture - my Haier cost $298, the equivalent Dometic 3-way gas fridge costs about $3000.

we previously had a smaller 150 litre gas fridge and a small solar power system. We worked out it was cheaper to buy the electric fridge and upgrade our solar to give us the extra electricity we needed to run it, than it was to buy the gas fridge, even without factoring in the gas consumption of the new fridge. Plus the extra solar panels give us more power to use for other things, too.

 

[appnut]

As I've previously stated in the forum, the house my parents bought September 1961 was an all gas house, complete with gas central air. And there was not a 240V line for an electric dryer.

My dad told me that when the Astrodome was designed in 1962 and completed in late 1964, it had both gas and electric a/c. The logic was gas was cheaper to do the normal maintenance of cooling but electric was turned on to bring the inside temp down quickly in preparation for game crowds.

 

[appnut]

gas dryer commercial

Our 1964 Norge dispensomat washer and wrinkle-out dryer

 

[variflexpghpa]

HOW TO INSTALL AND KEY COMPONENTS

 

[sudsmaster]

Gas clothes drying is more efficient and cheaper to run than electric gas drying. That is, if you have natural gas piped into the home. Same for natural gas home heating.

 

I remember once learning about how a gas flame can be used to power a refrigerator, but have banished that from my memory banks. I'm not surprised however that it's less efficient than electric refrigeration. I suppose it makes sense if one lives in the wilderness with no electric service but a big LPG tank out by the side of the cabin. Even then, with the advent of more efficient solar electric panels and storage batteries, electric may be a better solution there, as well.

 

 

[sudsmaster]

This might be a decent explanation of how a gas powered refrigerator works. You may wish to page backward to get more of the basics.

 

 

https://home.howstuffworks.com/refrigerator5.htm

 

[gusherb]

The gas company for the city of Chicago is called Peoples Gas... 

 

There was a This Old House season from around 1991 where they were in Tucson and they went with a natural gas chiller to cool the house. I didn't know it had been a thing even that recent. 

 

 

 

[toploader55]

In 1967, My Dad's restaurant had a Major Renovation.

He replaced a 1950's Carrier Stand up Console (with a water tower on the roof) with Bryant Gas Air.

This was nothing but problems right out of the gate. The pump failed continuously. We averaged one pump per year.

However, when it did work, it was like Antartica in the bar. When they first got it running they brought the bar down to 59 degrees on a Hot July day.

He sold the place in 1975 and as far as I know it was still there for a bit after the sale.

 

[twintubdexter]

<span style="font-size: 14pt; color: #008000;">According to what I've read, half of Dinah Shore's ashes are interned in Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City and the other half is down the street from me in Forest Lawn in Cathedral City. I guess I could take a walk down there and ask her how she liked her gas air conditioning but I'd probably only get half the story. Besides, it was 121 degrees next-door in Palm Springs last Sunday. Not exactly "walking" weather. Her home has been for sale twice since I've lived here. I'm sure the gas air conditioning is long gone.</span>

 

[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.