As the summers get hotter every year, the central air conditioners in our houses have had to work extra time. If your air conditioner is a relatively new one, you can still use it for those extra few hours during the summer. But if it is one which has been installed ages ago, and you should be thinking of getting the unit replaced.



And what you will immediately notice if you go out to look for a new central air conditioning unit these days is the remarkable advancement in technology it has gone through. In fact the changes are so dramatic that if you hadn't kept yourself up to date about the new innovations, you would find them hard to believe.

The one are where a significant advancement has happened is the efficiency of the units. While previously the units had SEER ratings of anything between 7 and 10 it has now jumped to 13. and SEER 13 has now been made mandatory for all central air conditioners by the US Department of Energy. For those who are not aware of what SEER is, it is the acronym for Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio. What it measures is the ratio the heat exchanged by your air conditioner to the power it has used for the same. The higher the ratio the more efficient your unit is.

How does it help you having a more efficient air conditioner? The answer is simple. You save more on your electricity bills. The less power your unit uses the less will be your running costs. But then you will ask what the government gains out of you saving money? The fact is, even if the government doesn't care about how much you save, but they are concerned about the environment and more energy efficient machines will mean less of fossil fuels being used which release greenhouse gases upon being used.

The ductless air conditioners basically are a derivative from the central air conditioning system and the window air conditioning system taking the plusses from both, and removing the restrictions of each. The necessity for inventing this ductless air conditioners can be traced back to a few reasons. First of all, not all houses had the provision for ducts being installed. Even if the house had provisions, installing ducts would be a pretty expensive exercise.

There have been other changes too. One significant change is the programmable thermostats. This allows you to control the temperature of the room even while you are sleeping. Since you can preset the thermostat levels you can have the temperature increased gradually. This saves a lot of energy and your running costs.

Even the fan inside the air conditioner has been made automatic. So it will run only when it needs to. This is another innovative way to save energy. Things have indeed changed.