Air con / climate control

[speedyman]

Please excuse my ignorance here, but what is the difference between air conditioning and climate control. I've seen Boxster's advertised with either of these. I know what "real" air conditioning is (fridge), but what's climate control and is it any good, whats best?

cheers

Speedyman

[leosayer]

Climate control (in theory) lets you select the interior temp of the car (eg to 19c) and the car will sense the current temperature and then issue heat or cold to reach this.

Air con just delivers cold air which you can adjust by fiddling with the heater temp knob.

[phelix]

And climate control will adjust the fan speed to match as well, at least newer P-cars. On most cars you have the choice of switching the AC compressor on or off. And CC systems most are clever; in the winter the fan will run at low speed until there's heat available in the heater matrix and only then will they raise the fan speed as required until the interior warms up.

CC is nice to have as you can spend less time fiddling with the controls but it's not perfect. One annoying thing about the CC in my BMW, for example, is that if the temp is set to 18 C the fan will run at max speed trying to cool the car on a sunny 20 degree day. So I'll have to either manually turn down the fan or raise the temp. But that evening when I want to car to be 18 and it's 10 outside I'll have to reset the fan speed to auto or lower the temp setting. So CC isn't quite set and forget but it's a big step closer.

[speedyman]

But does climate control have the ability to get the car as cold as air conditioning does or to put it another way, does climate control include an ac unit in the car as well.



speedyman

[agent006]

speedyman said:

But does climate control have the ability to get the car as cold as air conditioning does or to put it another way, does climate control include an ac unit in the car as well.

Yes

[Pickled Piper]

Climate control will do everything that AC does and more. It typically is an AC system with a sophisticated control system.

I don't know the intimate details of the Porsche system but in terms of cool down the climate control system will measure the outside temperature, if this is above a pre set threshold it will go into recirculation mode reducing the time to cool down as it will not keep drawing hot air from outside the vehicle. Similarly if it is extremely cold it will switch to recirc mode until the cabin has warmed up. It can typically do a number of other things in terms of air distribution.

It's one of those things that you can do without until you actually experience it. In short it gets you comfortable quicker than AC with the minimum of knob twiddling.

pp

[speedyman]

Cheers all, its all become clear now.

Speedyman