Mini Split Air Conditioner / Heat pump
Has anybody boondocking adopted this techno to there RV to have cold air in summer and heat in winter 24/7 while using solar?
Forum Discussion
Walkdog wrote:
https://www.homedepot.com/p/DuctlessAire-Energy-Star-12-000-BTU-1-Ton-Ductless-Mini-Split-Air-Conditioner-and-Heat-Pump-Variable-Speed-Inverter-220V-60Hz-DA1221-H2/300696598
4amp it says i assume that is a hour. Of course the one i'm acctually looking at is aroud 10-15. 10amp hours is 16 hour day is 160 amp hours in a 16 hour period. Right? Am i wrong. If so please put me back into place. So i should be able to run at least my air and pc and a 32 inch with direct tv attached and what not for a good while
Amperes are already a rate; saying amperes per hour doesn't make much sense. An ampere flowing for an hour is an ampere-hour or amp hour for short, and is a unit of charge. (If it were fluids we were talking about, an ampere might be equivalent to a gallon per minute, and an ampere-hour to a gallon-per-minute hour, which would of course work out to sixty gallons. It wouldn't make much sense to talk of a pump providing 5 gpm per hour, though.)
You do need to take voltage into account for these computations. I think it's less confusing to think in terms of energy (watt-hours or kilowatt-hours) rather than charge (amp-hours) as energy usage is really what you're studying and so the voltages etc. will "automatically" work out.
4A at 220V is 880W, so running for an hour would be about 880 Wh. One amp at 12V is 12 Wh and a 200 Ah 12V battery setup would contain 2400 Wh. So, in theory, this battery bank would run the air conditioner for something like 2-3 hours.
In practice, the power consumption of the air conditioner is not going to be constant (one of the ways that mini-splits get their efficiency is by adjusting the speed of the compressor and fans to meet the demands), and the usable battery capacity varies with the rate of power usage, and there are conversion inefficiencies in inverting the 12V to 220V, and so on. The math is at best only useful for a rough back-of-the-envelope estimate of what might be possible.
To summarize: 4A over 1 hour is, by definition, 4 Ah, but this is not a very useful number without the voltage also being specified simultaneously.
