Whether you live on the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast or in Brisbane, summer nights can be really uncomfortable. The heat and humidity can keep you tossing and turning for hours, leaving you tired the next day — and so, many Australians turn to home air conditioning for comfort. If you’re still researching for your air-conditioning purchase, let us help you out with our free Buyer’s Guide.
We can all recall hearing old window air conditioner units cutting in and out at night – they would either go full throttle or not at all. Operating in a stop/start, fixed speed mode made these units highly inefficient. Modern inverter models increase or decrease power slowly, maintaining the ambient temperature of the room with lower running costs.Usually bedroom air conditioning units are only 2.5 – 3.5kw units, so they are small – but every little bit of power saving helps.
The challenge is, how do you sleep in the cool WITHOUT the skyrocketing energy bills? If you turn your airconditioner off when you go to bed, you’ll only wake up later in a sweat.
New inverter technology and “smart” circuitry has found the answer — taking your comfort a step further with sleep mode. Here’s how it works…
Say you set your air conditioner at 24°C, on sleep mode, when you go to sleep. At first, the inverter will work hard to get the ambient temperature of the room to your chosen set point. Then, the inverter will ramp right down (therefore using less energy) to maintain the temperature and get you comfortably off to sleep.
Once you are asleep, you don’t need the room to be as cool to stay comfortable — so it makes no sense to keep the unit working hard. This is where sleep mode makes the difference.
In sleep mode, the airconditioner will then increase the temperature by half a degree every hour for four hours, sending an originally 24°C room to 26°C. Depending on your model of air conditioner, the unit will then turn off or stay quietly functioning at 26°C.
You don’t need the same cooling early in the morning, so the result of using sleep mode is economical and comfortable.
Using sleep mode can also really help shift workers who sleep during the day with both getting to sleep and staying comfortable. It takes more power to cool a room during the heat of the day — so using sleep mode, which lowers power usage after a few hours of using the air conditioner, really helps to cut costs.
If your air conditioner has a built-in intelligent movement sensor (as included with some Daikin and Panasonic models), it will work even more effectively.
These units still follow the same routine as other models with sleep function (going up half a degree per hour). However, it also knows that when you are peacefully asleep and lying still, that means you are comfortable.
If these models detect movement in the room (of you tossing and turning as your sleep is disturbed), it will break the sleep mode cycle and bring the temperature of the room back to 24°C so that you are comfortable again.
When it senses that you have returned to a comfortable sleep, it will slowly raise the temperature again, before turning off. It will turn on again at any point in the night if you start to move again – as this indicates to the air conditioner that you are hot and uncomfortable.
Thus, the system works with your body’s natural sleep cycle and the ambient room temperature, giving you a perfect nights’ sleep.
To learn more about using your air conditioner’s sleep mode to help you sleep better and save power, click here talk to the team at Acer Services today!
Acer Services installs home air conditioning in the Gold Coast, Brisbane, Redlands, Ipswich, Sunshine Coast and Toowoomba areas, so our experienced air conditioning installers are ready and keen to help!
