Air Conditioning

Opinion1: With a single (non-ducted) unit mounted mid-coach near the stairs to the bedroom (in small 24 ft rig), it keeps the bedroom at a very comfortable level without having too much cool air blowing directly on you. Our old non-NH (New Horizons) unit had the AC ducted in the ceiling with several vents along the length of the unit. The ceiling ducts, although supposedly insulated, did absorb heat, decreasing the efficiency of the unit. The non-ducted system seems to work much better, even if it is more noisy.

O2: main thing is to have a very well insulated RV, which will require less A/C operation whether ducted or not. And whatever the RV, I'd rather have dual A/C units with which to do the A/C-is-running-at-the-other-end-of-the-RV trick!

O3: My A/C did a horrible job keeping the unit cool. I took the trailer to an A/C specialist to find out what was wrong. I expected them to say it was not functioning in some way. But they actually said the unit was running fine. It was the ducting that took away so much of the cooling power trying to force the cool air through the ducts.

O4: Have a 32' and went with 2 units for a little different reason. Did not upgrade the 13.5 but added a 7.1 in the bedroom. Two main reasons: (1.) as a backup in case main unit went out (2.) I wanted a unit I could run off my Prosine 3.0 inverter for a few hours to help reduce heat if broke down or just needed to pull over for a short break. Six T105 batteries allows me to do this and if times really turn bad carry a Honda 2000 to back up batteries. Have used both units at the same time less than 10 hours. Also good to know that the inverter would kick on if power is lost while in RV park if concerned about heat build up as we leave our dog in 5W some. Do a cool down then just leave the 7.1on if we are going to be away for a few hours, no stress on us or the dog that way. Always try to stay on top half of batteries but will always take dead batteries over dead pet.

O5: we have ordered ducted AC. However, in ducting the AC, NH has doubled the insulation in the roof, so that the ducts do have a full layer of insulation on them and the rest of the roof has twice as much insulation as before. Hearing the AC running in the prototype while we were at the factory in May/June, it did sound quieter and did seem to cool quite quickly and efficiently. but as explained there manufacturing mixup caused non-ducted AC. the NH units are insulated well-enough and the a/c units matched well enough and placed well enough that they do a very nice job of cooling 33 ft 5W.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License