Johnson Controls (JCI) HVACR Trends - GineersNow Engineering Magazine Key Trends Making Our Cities Greener & Smarter | Page 10

This Portable Air
Conditioner Can Fit In
Your Pocket And Be
Clipped Onto Your Belt
You can now bring your air conditioner outside with
you during those hot, sunny days
It’s summer, the whether is a burning 34 degrees
Celsius, and you regret leaving the comfort of
your air conditioned home. It’s times like these
where you wish you could just take off your air
conditioner from the wall and bring it with you
wherever you go. Well, now, it’s possible with this
new Kickstarter Project!
The Kul-U Pocket is a portable air-conditioner that
can, well, fit in your pocket. It can deliver up to
20,000 calories of cooling capacity whenever you
need it, wherever you need it. Being rechargeable,
it can last for 3-4 hours on max cooling settings
and almost all day on lower settings. Oh, and
it doesn’t make any noise, so you can even
activate it during meetings and such. It also has a
temperature adjustment feature, as even at lower
settings, the unit will still cool you down too well,
sometimes too much, allowing you to bypass the
cooling unit and either increase or decrease the
temperature when needed.
How does the Kul-U Pocket work? Well, it’s
basically a combination of fan cooling, ice
cooling, and evaporative cooling in one slim and
small object. As the company behind the project
wrote on their kickstarter page, “Each of the three
methods of cooling mentioned above will do
some cooling and most of the personal cooling
devices on the market today use one or two of
these methods. They all have their advantages
and disadvantages. Our secret is, we use all
three. This allows Kul-U to work even in the most
humid of climates where evaporative cooling
alone would fail.”
8
HVACR Leaders • May 2017
You also don’t have to worry about your pocket
getting wet; It doesn’t condense air on the
exterior of the object, and all the condensate on
the interior will be either absorbed the the cooling
unit itself or get caught in the waterproof cap at
the bottom. The unit also comes with a bunch of
easy-to-access controls on the top of the unit for
easier manipulation even when it’s in your pocket.
It’s also quite sleek and lightweight, at only 7.3”
by 2.95” by 1.1” in dimension, and weighing just
a little over 250 grams. And as mentioned earlier,
it’s very quiet, with an adjustable fan wind speed
ranging from whisper quiet mode (>5db) up to
max cool (28db), so you can cool down without
everyone in the office staring at you.