Morphy Richards Ductless Portable Air Conditioner funded by Kickstarter!

[elliottveares]

I couldn't quite believe it when I saw it, and then I found out that it was being funded by Kickstarter when Morphy Richards is a established UK company (est 1936) and is worth multi millions according to sources online.

TLDR, they are trying to sell ductless portable air conditioner with A-Class energy efficiency that is supposedly not a swamp cooler but a normal portable AC unit that does not require a duct. 

Kick starter is here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1464329619/morphy-richards-first-ductless-portable-air-conditioner?ref=7uvdqc

YouTube video is here:

At best it's just a elaborate swamp cooler in my opinion, but feel it's far worse in reality! It's either that and is going to make the room really humid or else it's violating the laws of thermodynamics.

Would love if Dave did a video on this, as this is complete BS to me. As Scotty would say, I Can't Change The Laws Of Physics.

Regards: Elliott.

[SiliconWizard]

Uh yeah. So the hot side is not heating up the room because it's cooled down with water. Sure. Who would have thought, that's genius.

[elliottveares]

Which is not only going to increase the relative humidity in the room, but will also eventfully start heating the room up as well when the air reaches saturation, not to mention the heat from the compressor itself.

[thm_w]

One application is if you are working in a large unconditioned warehouse, sometimes you want cool air blowing on you while you are working. And you don't really care if you heat up the warehouse, its not significant.

Of course in a small house or room thats not going to work. You can also just use a normal portable AC to accomplish this, it doesn't need to be some fancy "ductless" model.

[tom66]

Is it designed a bit like a condenser tumble dryer - produce a tank of hot water which has to be periodically emptied?

Let's say it has a 20L tank, that's about the maximum I think a healthy adult could lift out of the machine to empty it.  20L of water at, let's say, maximum safe contact temperature of 60C to avoid scalding, and starting off at the tap temperature of 20C (summer's day).  So 40C rise of 20L of water - by my maths that's just around 0.93kWh. 

Even a 5000BTU unit will move more heat than that in an hour... and that will just about be enough for a small box room.

So yeah, I must be missing something here.

Surely they can't just be dumping humid heat directly into the room... yes, that will cool down the surface of whatever the cold outlet is pointed at, but the room will still get warmer!

[SiliconWizard]

One application is if you are working in a large unconditioned warehouse, sometimes you want cool air blowing on you while you are working. And you don't really care if you heat up the warehouse, its not significant.

Yeah, that works for a while, until ambiant air is saturated (and if it's not already in humid areas).

[NiHaoMike]

Is it designed a bit like a condenser tumble dryer - produce a tank of hot water which has to be periodically emptied?

Let's say it has a 20L tank, that's about the maximum I think a healthy adult could lift out of the machine to empty it.  20L of water at, let's say, maximum safe contact temperature of 60C to avoid scalding, and starting off at the tap temperature of 20C (summer's day).  So 40C rise of 20L of water - by my maths that's just around 0.93kWh. 

So have a hose to dump out hot water and another hose to bring in cool water. Then redirect the water so it can be used for showers or whatever. Wait a minute, I built something like that 11 years ago...

[Halcyon]

Seems odd that a huge company like Morphy Richards (which is part owned by the Chinese and the Irish) should launch a kickstarter campaign.

It kind of goes against the spirit of Kickstarter.

Why use their own R&D money when someone else can pay for it? It doesn't sit right with me.

[SiliconWizard]

Is it designed a bit like a condenser tumble dryer - produce a tank of hot water which has to be periodically emptied?

Let's say it has a 20L tank, that's about the maximum I think a healthy adult could lift out of the machine to empty it.  20L of water at, let's say, maximum safe contact temperature of 60C to avoid scalding, and starting off at the tap temperature of 20C (summer's day).  So 40C rise of 20L of water - by my maths that's just around 0.93kWh. 

So have a hose to dump out hot water and another hose to bring in cool water. Then redirect the water so it can be used for showers or whatever. Wait a minute, I built something like that 11 years ago...

How did that turn out in practice?

There are certainly many opportunities for optimizing our use of energy for heating & cooling. We need to cool stuff and heat other stuff and usually, we do both completely separately.
Since cooling (except when purely using evaporation, which is endothermic) generates heat with compressors (so AC, fridges, etc), reusing that to heat water for our hot water needs makes sense. Storing that heat instead of releasing it in the air.

[johansen]

I turned a 30 pint per day dehumidifier into a water cooled air conditioner, dumping 120F hot water down the drain. My (now) wife said it worked better than a 1 ton, single pipe  portable ac.


It only pulled 400 watts compared to 1200!

[johansen]

Wait a minute, I built something like that 11 years ago...

Seems a little complex, got a block diagram?

[NiHaoMike]

How did that turn out in practice?

There are certainly many opportunities for optimizing our use of energy for heating & cooling. We need to cool stuff and heat other stuff and usually, we do both completely separately.
Since cooling (except when purely using evaporation, which is endothermic) generates heat with compressors (so AC, fridges, etc), reusing that to heat water for our hot water needs makes sense. Storing that heat instead of releasing it in the air.

Worked very well. Better in summer than winter, which turns out to be the majority of Texas weather anyways.

Seems a little complex, got a block diagram?

One of the research interests was the ejector cycle for further boosting efficiency hence the complexity. Nowadays, I would say the added complexity is probably not worth it and just add a little bit more solar instead.

[tom66]

Mains water cooled A/C isn't that uncommon if retrofitted to apartments where adding outdoor units is difficult or prohibited by the lease - my brother had one at his London flat.  It took mains water, heated it up, and dumped that water down the sewage system, effectively using the sewers as a big heat sink.

Yes, it's about as wasteful as it sounds, using probably around 40L per hour of operation.

[NiHaoMike]

The irony is that in some cases, the water use might be offset by the greater efficiency resulting in less water used for electricity generation. That obviously depends on a lot of things, for example wind and solar use negligible amounts of water.

[factory]

I couldn't quite believe it when I saw it, and then I found out that it was being funded by Kickstarter when Morphy Richards is a established UK company (est 1936) and is worth multi millions according to sources online.

To me Morphy Richards is just another zombie brand, it was taken over by Glen Dimplex in the 80s, the brand was sold to a Chinese company (Xinbao) in 2022, the same company that had been making the products for Glen Dimplex and sticking the Morphy Richards name on. Expect really poor quality (like most things these days), such as steel crimp terminals.  Never had this problem in the EU made stuff.

David

[mendip_discovery]

Seems odd that a huge company like Morphy Richards (which is part owned by the Chinese and the Irish) should launch a kickstarter campaign.

It kind of goes against the spirit of Kickstarter.

Why use their own R&D money when someone else can pay for it? It doesn't sit right with me.

Kickstarter has drifted away from its intentions many years ago. Several times I have seen a firm make a product and as soon as they have shipped the next version is on KS and the old one doesn't get support or any fixes.

I suspect the CEO has suggested using Kickstarter to promote and sell a new product, much like how mine wants me to be on TikTok to make contact with customers.

[elliottveares]

It's interesting as when I look at the comments about it on YouTube, Instagram, etc... most people are saying it will be useless, is a scam, will make the room warmer, are bringing up the mention of the laws of physics, etc...

My fear is it will be advertised, or at least people will misunderstand it to be a whole room cooling solution rather than spot cooling.

[nctnico]

I turned a 30 pint per day dehumidifier into a water cooled air conditioner, dumping 120F hot water down the drain. My (now) wife said it worked better than a 1 ton, single pipe  portable ac.

Those portable ACs are just utter crap. Litterally anything else will work better. The principal problem with portable ACs is that they suck the air from the room and dump it outside and thus pull hot air from the outside back into the room resulting in no cooling at all.

[NiHaoMike]

Those portable ACs are just utter crap. Litterally anything else will work better. The principal problem with portable ACs is that they suck the air from the room and dump it outside and thus pull hot air from the outside back into the room resulting in no cooling at all.

Some of the latest energy efficiency standards now give a penalty for single hose units. It would effectively force all of them to be dual hose units, at a minimal extra cost.

[tom66]

I turned a 30 pint per day dehumidifier into a water cooled air conditioner, dumping 120F hot water down the drain. My (now) wife said it worked better than a 1 ton, single pipe  portable ac.

Those portable ACs are just utter crap. Litterally anything else will work better. The principal problem with portable ACs is that they suck the air from the room and dump it outside and thus pull hot air from the outside back into the room resulting in no cooling at all.

They're less efficient than a mini-split, sure, but "utter crap" they are not.  Both of ours keep our offices cool in the summer.  Yes, we want whole-home AC, but we're not sure if we're going to be in this house long term, so it doesn't make sense to make the investment in that yet. We only use the portable AC units for about a week a year on the hottest months so the energy consumption is negligible.

[johansen]

They're less efficient than a mini-split, sure, but "utter crap" they are not.  Both of ours keep our offices cool in the summer.  Yes, we want whole-home AC, but we're not sure if we're going to be in this house long term, so it doesn't make sense to make the investment in that yet. We only use the portable AC units for about a week a year on the hottest months so the energy consumption is negligible.

two hose or singles?

you can work the math out but the 5K btu 140$ window units are about twice as efficient as single hose ac's unless... you're not paying for the rest of the building to be cooled. so say its 85F outside and you're cooling just one office cubicle at 15 cents an hour. 140$ divided by 7.5 cents an hour is a long time.

[tom66]

They're less efficient than a mini-split, sure, but "utter crap" they are not.  Both of ours keep our offices cool in the summer.  Yes, we want whole-home AC, but we're not sure if we're going to be in this house long term, so it doesn't make sense to make the investment in that yet. We only use the portable AC units for about a week a year on the hottest months so the energy consumption is negligible.

two hose or singles?

you can work the math out but the 5K btu 140$ window units are about twice as efficient as single hose ac's unless... you're not paying for the rest of the building to be cooled. so say its 85F outside and you're cooling just one office cubicle at 15 cents an hour. 140$ divided by 7.5 cents an hour is a long time.

Unfortunately, window AC is all but unheard of for UK homes as we don't have the lift-up windows that would be required to fit one of those.  We use single hose units - two hose units are a bit more efficient but I don't see many of those for sale.

The daytime electricity price here is about 22p (~$0.29) and the units use less than 1.2kW running combined (~27p/hr).  So if a proper AC install would cost ~£4,000 to get both rooms done and would then use around half the energy, it'd take over 20k hours to break even by my maths...  Given they probably get a total of 300 hours of use a year, it wouldn't make sense from a financial point of view.  It'd only make sense to get better cooling and/or cosmetically it looks a lot nicer.

[nctnico]

Those portable ACs are just utter crap. Litterally anything else will work better. The principal problem with portable ACs is that they suck the air from the room and dump it outside and thus pull hot air from the outside back into the room resulting in no cooling at all.

Some of the latest energy efficiency standards now give a penalty for single hose units. It would effectively force all of them to be dual hose units, at a minimal extra cost.

Dual hose makes a lot more sense. But split unit is better. Both more efficient and quiet. I'm on my second split unit as my wife demanded to have airco on the floor with the bedrooms as well so I had to upgrade the old (single) unit which cooled my office only. DIY install is pretty doable but requires purchasing some specific tools (like a vacuum pump) & consumables (like leak detection fluid and sealant for couplings) which can be sold at purchase price.

[thm_w]

Unfortunately, window AC is all but unheard of for UK homes as we don't have the lift-up windows that would be required to fit one of those.  We use single hose units - two hose units are a bit more efficient but I don't see many of those for sale.

You don't need lift up windows to install an AC, but it does make it easier. If its big enough you can just install a sheet of plywood or plexiglass and a u-shape AC: https://www.almarappliance.com/products/Midea/mda/maw08v1qwt.html these are only $200-300.

DIY split mini kits that are quick connect also exist, no vacuum pump needed, but they are ~$1800: https://www.homedepot.ca/product/mrcool-diy-smart-mini-split-12-000-btu-22-5-seer-ductless-air-conditioner-with-heat-pump-115v-/1001815621

[tom66]

DIY mini-splits (except the ones that use propane) are unfortunately not legal in the UK and can create issues if a house is sold afterwards as there is usually a requirement to prove they've been properly installed.  All because of refrigerant regulations... or a very loud F-Gas lobby who don't want their lucrative business going away.  (They've been loud about the propane ones, calling them dangerous, but they really aren't.)