New Air Conditioning Technologies That Could Be Coming To Your Home Soon

You've been paying a fortune to air condition your house during heat waves, or you might find that you prematurely need a new air conditioning unit because yours has been overworked. Many people, from environmental researchers to manufacturing engineers, are perpetually looking for a better way to cool homes — and for good reason. According to the International Energy Agency, the global demand for energy to power air conditioning is rapidly growing. As the agency's executive director Dr. Fatih Birol discusses the growing usage explaining, "With rising incomes, air conditioner ownership will skyrocket, especially in the emerging world. While this will bring extra comfort and improve daily lives, it is essential that efficiency performance for ACs be prioritized."

Cheaper, more environmentally friendly cooling will become more essential over the coming decades. While efficiency regulation might pave the way, it's innovation that will move us down the road. Thanks to technology and ingenuity, these are some groundbreaking air conditioning revolutions that could be coming to your home in the near future.

If you're familiar with them, you might think geothermal heat pumps are the sort of bleeding-edge high-tech wizardry that might never become a useful thing. But that's wrong on both counts. Geothermal technology isn't much different in concept from an old-school root cellar, and according to the Department of Energy, about 50,000 geothermal heat pumps are installed in the U.S. each year. Geothermal, or ground-source, heat pumps exchange heat from the ground with a medium like water or an antifreeze solution to drive indoor heating and cooling. This works because below-ground temperatures remain fairly constant, regardless of enormous differences in temperature above the surface (via Cielo).

Geothermal systems have a lot of benefits, like their durability, low maintenance costs, and unobtrusive workings. The key factor is that they are more efficient than dual-fuel systems. They even use less electricity if you invest in a system that also provides geothermal-preheated hot water for your home. But there are some downsides as well. Having a system installed can be a big investment, though this is usually recouped within six to seven years.

You've seen ductless mini-splits, and perhaps you even understand that they're a great way to air condition spaces that can't easily be retrofitted with ducts. But the lowly mini-split has a lot of benefits and uses and probably should be even more common than they are. These air conditioners are composed of two units, an outdoor compressor and an indoor air handler with which the user interacts, says Comfort Up. They are used for both heating and cooling and are sometimes confused with the Packaged Terminal Air Conditioner (PTAC) systems seen in hotel rooms, though mini-splits are becoming more common there as well. PTACs are single-unit systems that work through a wall and are less efficient than mini-splits.

Ductless mini-splits are very flexible and have some significant benefits. First of all, they can be installed where ductwork doesn't exist. They are great for zoning, when individual rooms or areas are heated and cooled to different levels. And they tend to have very high SEER ratings, in part because ductwork can be responsible for as much as 30 percent of the energy used by air conditioning units (via the U.S. Department of Energy). They tend to result in improved indoor air quality, and are fairly easy to install (via WilmingtonBiz Insights). Proper system design is crucial to the efficient use of mini-splits, in order to avoid inefficient interactions among the systems like short-cycling.

If you asked a classroom full of first-graders to devise an air conditioning system, it might look like the technology that's been pushed with middling success in California since the early 2000s. But a mediocre track record doesn't always indicate a mediocre idea. It's possible that this seemingly simple idea might be potentially successful in the future.

Ice-powered air conditioning, pioneered by a company called Ice Energy, creates a large block of ice at night and uses it to cool a building for part or all of the following day. Although the most recent iterations required supplemental AC and large amounts of water, Ice Energy secured contracts with Southern California Edison to implement the technology (via CleanTechnica). Unfortunately, Ice Energy filed for bankruptcy in 2019 and its products are not currently available. But the tech remains promising because it promises to use far less energy during the hottest periods. A Tennessee installation evaluated by the Electric Power Research Institute met Ice Energy's claims. EPRI says the technology would be ideal for residential applications and light commercial office space.

Combination with desiccants apparently isn't the only way to re-engineer evaporative cooling to make it work better. Several of the most promising evolving cooling concepts have the potential to radically overhaul the HVAC market and, in the process, do wonders for the environment. Four such projects were also finalists in the Global Cooling Prize, including Gree, one of the two winners.

These included Indian company Godrej's project to merge standard and evaporative cooling technologies to reduce AC energy costs by as much as 80%, and Kraton's NexarCool concept in which a refrigerant-free evaporative cooling technology that uses the company's Nexar membrane to dehumidify air. This was similar to finalist M2 Thermal Solutions' low-energy, membrane-based evaporative cooling and dehumidification technology. Winner Gree's project was perhaps the ultimate mashup, integrating vapor compression, PV solar tech, evaporative cooling, and ventilation. The Gree entry was noted for its efficiency in making use of renewable and cheap cooling.

Air conditioning innovation doesn't always have to overhaul the AC itself. Could be that what you need most, or at least first, is something to do a better job of deciding where the cold or warm air goes, and when. But many other improvements fall in the territory around smart home and home automation technologies. These industries have recently matured to the point that they're not only viable but a critical part of the path forward.

Consider tech giant Cisco's Digital Ceilings, for example, which use an array of sensors to detect occupancy, temperature, and humidity, and thereby efficiently drive HVAC systems. The company claims its technology is capable of cutting energy costs in commercial spaces through very granular, room-by-room data monitoring and system control. Such sensors or sensor arrays can improve efficiency at every level of HVAC operation, including improving and increasing preventive maintenance. Perhaps the most significant element is the occupancy sensor, which makes use of passive infrared (PIR) and ultrasonic motion sensors not very different from those that have been included in kids' computer science and robotics kits for years.

Another aspect of the smart home revolution, the smart thermostat is already very common. In spite of their already being everywhere, the truth is that they just didn't do a great job any time a heat pump was involved because constantly adjusting a heat pump can destroy its built-in attempts at efficiency. But, like everything else, they've gotten better. In fact, smart thermostats are now capable of overcoming a limitation by which adjusting heat pump thermostats traditionally made the systems inefficient (via Energy Saver).