Cooling Tech

Why Are Compressors Measured in Tons?

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When we look at compressors, there are a lot of numbers going around, but one of the bigger ones is the Tons. We sell compressors in all manner of weight-ratings, from less than a ton to hundreds of tons. The thing is though, this doesn’t mean we need a crane and a massive truck to load the compressor before it ships out. Compressor tonage is not actually a measure of weight. In fact, it is the result of some weird and convoluted math and history.   Old Fashioned AC Before we had the modern air conditioner, there were just a handful of ways to actually cool a room or a building. You could open a window, sit in front of a fan, use an evaporative cooler, or get a block of ice. That’s right, once upon a time we didn’t just have “ice boxes”, we had ice-conditioning too. The precursor to modern refrigeration was massive chunks of ice, usually cut from frozen lakes in the north and hastily delivered anywhere cooling was needed. You would go down to your local ice house and buy however much your fridge or cooling system needed. For building-scale cooling, there would be a block of ice essentially placed in a special cabinet in the air ducts and fans would blow air over it. The ice would remove heat from the air and melt. The air would be cooled and circulated around the room or […]

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Cooling Tech

What About the Other Compressors?

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Just how many ways are there to squeeze down a gas? If you look at the entirety of the industrial world, there’s probably a few hundred different devices. If you look at HVAC, luckily the list is a lot shorter. The air conditioning world relies primarily on five compressor designs.   Reciprocating This compressor works pretty much exactly the same as a car engine does, but without the gasoline and combustion. Inside a car you have your cylinders and pistons. When the piston moves up it compresses, when it goes down it sucks. The same principal is used in a reciprocating compressor. At the base of the compressor there will generally be an electric motor, which turns a shaft. The shaft has a bend in it to allow for offset motion. At the bend there’s a connecting rod, which links the shaft to the piston. When the shaft spins, the piston moves up and down. On the downstroke, fresh refrigerant is pulled in. On the up stroke the refrigerant is compressed and injected into the refrigerant loop. This particular design is popular in residential scale compressors. There are more parts involved, so there’s a greater chance of hardware failure, but the well understood nature of the piston and cylinder as well as massive manufacturing tolerances make them cheap to manufacture. Consider, steam engines were around in the 1800s, and this is the same principle as their driving pistons. The complexity […]

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