Dry ice Room Cooling

Most recent answer: 05/29/2012

Q:
can you use dry ice to cool a room instead of using the ac window unit
- neil (age 48)
Tarrant, AL. USA
A:
The direct way that you're probably considering might be to simply leave the dry ice in a room, maybe with a fan blowing over it to circulate the cold gas. That's a bad idea because as the dry ice (frozen CO2) evaporates, the CO2 gas concentration in the room will go up. Breathing too much CO2 can make you drowsy, and even be lethal in high enough amounts.() The reason that you don't have to be concerned about drowsiness ordinarily when using dry ice is that you aren't using the amounts that you'd need to provide much room cooling.

Of course if you used the dry ice to cool some exterior coils connected to an air-handling system in the room, there'd be no problem with excess CO2 in the room. Of course then you'd still have something like your window unit around.

Perhaps you might want to follow up with the reason you want to get rid of your window unit. There may be a more practical solution.

Mike W.

(published on 05/29/2012)