5 Benefits Of Air Conditioning You Might Not Have Realised

First and foremost, air conditioning is specifically designed to keep us cool, and obviously now that the hot weather’s coming in, that’s starting to be more useful than ever! But in addition to its primary function, air conditioning can provide us with all sorts of benefits that it can be all too easy to overlook. Have you ever considered, for example…

1. Air Conditioning Can Be Actively Good For Your Health

It’s fair to say that the weather is usually fairly mild here in the UK for most of the year (which is a nice way of saying it drizzles quite a lot). That means that when the weather does start to get properly hot, many of us underestimate it, and that can lead to heat-related illnesses like heat exhaustion or heatstroke. By keeping us cool and comfortable, air conditioning can actively fend off the worst effects of these.

While the risks of this are thankfully less pronounced in the average office, they can easily affect anyone in active environments like workshop floors, school halls, nurseries or gyms if they’re not sufficiently well ventilated. Dehydration is an early symptom of heat exhaustion, which can result in painful muscle spasms and cramps. If left unchecked, this can even progress to heat stroke, which can be potentially life-threatening.

2. It Protects Equipment and Machinery

It’s not just people who can be at risk of overheating. Office equipment and machinery can feel the effects too! Hard drives can overheat in exceptionally hot conditions and blink out at a crucial moment, potentially losing hours of work. Printers are another common (but thankfully less disastrous) possibility. This can be inconvenient at best, expensive if you have to replace the equipment, and potentially catastrophic if you lose an entire PC’s worth of work.

3. Fewer Outdoor Intrusions

This isn’t often a problem for most of the year, but now we’re rapidly moving into summer – let’s face it – it’s breeding time for lots of the creepy-crawlies. Even with screens, windows can be limited at keeping insects out. That’s not too bad on its own, as the occasional insect buzzing into a room is only a minor disruption in the summer. The thing to watch out for, though, is pollen and other allergens floating in through open windows, which can play havoc with the allergies of employees. Using air conditioning saves the windows from having to be open in the summer, protecting employees from having any possible reactions (like hay fever, for example).

4. Optimal Efficiency In Cooling A Room

We’ve spoken about this before on our blog – when it gets too hot, many people’s first reaction is to open a window. But in lots of cases, unless there’s a strong breeze outside to take the edge off the hot weather, opening a window doesn’t make a room immediately cooler. If there’s no movement of air, it’s often equally hot outside as it is inside, so there isn’t an immediately noticeable difference in temperature. Air conditioning, on the other hand, actively pumps cool air through a room, making it far more effective at lowering the temperature than opening a window (or even several!).

5. Better Security

Another important point about open windows – it can be all to easy to forget to close them at the end of the day, which can lead to unwanted intrusions during the evening. It’s a well known fact that the vast majority of thieves are opportunists, and an open window is a very attractive invitation you don’t want to extend. That can be very expensive when it comes to the workplace, and horribly intrusive at home. In addition to effectively cooling a room, air conditioning also means it stays tightly secure throughout, sparing you from having to worry about security concerns.

Of course, air conditioning can only provide you with all these benefits if it’s working at optimum capacity. The best way to ensure this is with a routine air-con service and maintenance – all the more important now the weather’s hotting up! Happily, that’s exactly the sort of service our expert heating and cooling technicians provide here at Askews – just click here for a free quote, and you can count on us to make sure you’re cool and comfortable throughout the whole summer.

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