It’s happened to the best of us. Right in the middle of the hottest summer imaginable, your air conditioner goes out. If this happens to your businesses or private residence, you may not be able to wait for the HVAC repairman to come in and fix your equipment. This is where portable air conditioning rental can come in handy.
When choosing the air conditioning equipment that you need to cool your space, you will have to take several different factors into account. These factors can be: square footage of the area that needs to be cooled, number of people in the location being cooled and the location of any windows or areas that can be used for ducting. This information is based on general situations for the rental of portable air conditioners, so be sure to speak to your sales representative to confirm any information on the selection of rental equipment. Every situation will be a little different.
Square Footage
Square Footage of the area is one of the largest deciding factors of what size of equipment that you will need. You will need to decide how many BTU’s you will need to cool the area, and then use this information to make a decision on equipment. A BTU (or British Thermal Unit) is the amount of heat that an air conditioner can remove from any given space. An easy calculation in your decision making process would be 12,000 BTU’s for every 450 square feet that you will need cooled. You can then take this BTU number and calculate how many tons you will need your equipment to be. One ton of air conditioning is equal to 12,000 BTU’s, so your 450 square foot area will require a 1-ton machine. The more space you are trying to cool, the larger the unit will have to be.
Amount of People
Another thing that you will have to take into account when choosing which equipment to rent would be the number of people that will be in the area that you are trying to cool. The general calculation for factoring in people into your decision would be 400 BTU’s for every person who will be in the area. This means that in areas such as small office settings and homes would have less impact on the air conditioner size, and large special events and schools would have much more impact.
Location for Ducting Your Air Conditioning
Along with considering the size of the space and number of people in that space, you will have to consider placement for the equipment. Let’s do a quick overview on how an air conditioner works. An air conditioner uses refrigeration to remove heat and humidity from the area, causing it to be cooled. To cool the area, the machine runs the warm air over a set of refrigerated coils to absorb the heat and humidity, and then, once it is cooled, pumps into the space that you wish to be cooled. This process forces the machine to produce a lot of unwanted heat. Now we don’t want this newly created heat to be pumped back into the space you just cooled, so it either needs to be ducted outside of the space through a window or ventilation system, or the equipment must be placed outside and have the cool air ducted in. Because of this, you will have to keep this in mind when choosing placement for your equipment. There are two ways that you can go about setting up the equipment. You can either rent a large unit to be placed outside of your building and have the cold air ducted into your space or you can choose to have a number of smaller units and duct the heat ducted out of the building.
Your Final Decision
In the end, there are many factors that will have to be considered before choosing which portable air conditioner you should rent for the space you have. Whether you are temporarily cooling your office building after an equipment failure, or you are cooling an area for a special event, there are many options for you to choose from. These are just suggestions for your decision making process. Be sure to speak with a trained sales representative about all of the special circumstances that you will need to take into account when renting.
