How many cars equals an air conditioner?

Answer 1

It would be more interesting to ask-How many cars equal a Nuclear Reactor. If anything pollutes our planet it is Nuclear Waste.And you guys have plenty of them.One ounce of nuclear waste takes 10,000 years to break down. So if anyones going to blame anyone for pollution, it has to be America. Don't you think?

Answer 2

Let's call the average electrical use of a US household to be
12,000 KiloWatt-hours. This is not far off the actual value.

Now, let's say 11% of this goes to air conditioning.

That is 1320 KW-hrs per household for air conditioning.

I'm not including the air conditioning used in business though.

1320 KW-hrs is the equivalent amount of energy as about 36 gallons of gas.

Now let's assume the average US household has 2 cars which average 20mpg and drive 15,000 miles per year.

That works out to 1500 gallons of gas.

That means one car is equal to 50 household air conditioning units. Of course if 50% of that energy is non-fossil fuel or coal, the ratio changes. But this is turning off your A/C, not improving it's efficiency.

To answer your question an A/C unit = 1/50th of a car.

Answer 3

Depends on the car and the air conditioner is correct.


The HVAC unit at the Holiday in would equate to a whole fleet of cars.

The AC unit in your car is obviously not equal to even one car... but has more cooling capacity than some small home central AC units...

Answer 4

There is a simple formula.

Take the square root of the horsepower of the car times the capacity of the air conditioner minus Planck's Constant.

I'm surprised you didn't know this.

Answer 5

Depends on a number of things, of course. What car, what air conditioner? How are they used?

But one to one is a very crude approximation. I haven't seen the ad you've asked about previously. But it sounds like nonsense to me. Can you give any more details? Who's talking in it? Who sponsored it?

Answer 6

Method A (per capita) 1 car = 12 air con units
Method B (total units) 1 car = 27 air con units

Because of the variables you need to allow a substantial margin of error, the real figure could be between 5 and 50.

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As you've asked this in the global warming section I guess you may mean 'how large a contribution to GW does one car make in relation to an air conditioning unit'.

Some interpolation will be required here and the figures are per capita, not per number of cars and air con units.

The average US household uses 11209 KWh of electricity per year, if an air con unit is run for 2 hours per day every day and has a 750W rating it will use 548 KWh per year or 4.889% of the total domestic electricity consumption.

In the US transportation accounts for 14.6% of grenhouse gas emissions of which approx 5% of the overall total is from cars. In the US total per capita GHG emissions are 19800kg PA.

There are 242 million passenger cars for a population of 301 million - average of 0.804 cars per person.

0.804 x 0.05 x 19800 = 795.96kg CO2 emissions per person in respect of cars.

Total power consumption contributes 19.9% of GHG emissions. Air con units constitute 4.889% of power consumption, total GHG emissions per capita = 19800kg. Air con units = therefore produce 193kg CO2 emissions per household (19800 x 0.199 x 0.04889).

There are 107 million households, total population = 301 million. Therefore per capita CO2 emissions attributable to air con units = 68kg per person.

Averaged across the population as a whole then 1 car = 796kg of CO2 emissions per year, one air con unit = 68kg.

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Alternative way of looking at it

242 million cars, 795.96kg CO2 emissions per car = 192,622,320,000kg CO2 emissions.

107 million householeds (assuming every house has air con), 68kg CO2 emissions per household = 7,276,000,000kg CO2 emissions.

Answer 7

How many apples equals an orange?