![]() The previous unit nevertheless worked well enough, even if occasionally it would be seized with a desire to freeze the room and plunge it down into the high 60s Fahrenheit until I noticed it or turned off its remotely controllable power outlet (which then caused it to forget its settings when it turned back on, though with a 72☏ default setpoint it would at least "fail cool"). Normies don't have a room with an IBM POWER6, Sawtooth G4 (and its FireWire RAID), Mac mini G4, Macintosh IIci, Alpha Micro Eagle 300, Cobalt RaQ and associated IoT devices and network backbone infrastructure running non-stop (to say nothing of the Apple Network Server 500 and HP 9000/350 that also occasionally come out to play). Normies get up and fiddle with the controls and turn the A/C off when they leave. You know, people who play PS5 and watch Netflix and maybe read a book. It's important to keep in mind, though, that a consumer portable A/C unit is for normies. I'm just a customer telling you what I bought.) (* A note here: Home Depot and LG are not sponsors. Unlike vintage computers and vintage nerds, vintage air conditioning units just don't age well. The difference is not only better technology but the greater efficiency of R-32, requiring 40% less refrigerant for the same cooling and having almost 13% greater cooling capacity. Convert it back to ASHRAE BTUs and it's a 12,000 BTU unit per LG's spec sheet - but full tilt pulls "just" 970W as opposed to the 1200W of the old unit, and is about 75% the size. Department of Energy standards, which is the newer measurement. Although the new one I selected (an LG LP0721WSR) says it's "only" 7,000 BTU, that's actually using U.S. Fortunately the heat doesn't end in my corner of sunny So Cal until around November, so when I went shopping Home Depot still had a selection of portable A/Cs in stock even this "late" in the season. Or, a medium sized bedroom with a whole bunch of computers in it. The old LG was a 11,000 BTU unit ( LP1111WXR) using R-401A which I bought off-the-rack from Home Depot and installed and insulated the duct myself, suitable to cool the volume of a medium-sized bedroom. When sizing replacement A/C units, remember that in the United States manufacturers only reported the ASHRAE BTU cooling capacity until 2017 (this is a nice explanation). I like old computers, but I try not to accumulate old broken computers, and that goes double for old broken air conditioners. This got to the point where it was unable to clear its own condensate and a couple days where I had to empty the drain pan about every 12 hours, versus never having to before (not a great deal of humidity here). The portable A/C was itself almost 11 years old by this time, and after that bad week running nearly non-stop started making an ominous unbalanced low warble from its exhaust fan. ![]() The house central A/C's compressor died abruptly this summer after over two decades, naturally during the hottest part of the year, and it took nearly a week and $14,000 to get it dealt with (it was an old R-22 system and thus everything had to be replaced). Unfortunately, what all this monitoring showed was the A/C unit was crapping out. The portable A/C unit exhausts warm air through a duct to the roof so the room can remain secure, and a turbine spins the hot air away into the atmosphere. The Sawtooth Power Mac G4 file server (and radio station) logs the temperature and humidity with a USB sensor of its own. The SMS gateway, basically an overgrown Raspberry Pi, uses a USB decibel meter to report ambient noise volume in the room, from which we can extrapolate the state of the air conditioner's compressor and fan. Previously we talked about monitoring the portable air conditioning unit keeping the server room cool. They heat our house in the winter here in primarily sunny Southern California (not as much as my wife would like, but that's another story for another day).
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