Does anybody know a lot about air conditioners? This is kind of a technical question, but this morning I put on the air conditioner for the first time this summer, and by accident left in on "heater" (I don't know about other places, but in Japan, air conditioners are also used as heaters in the winter). So my question is, what happens if the air conditioner is set to "heat" but the ambient temperature is way higher than the setting on the machine? Or vice versa, suppose you turn on the air conditioner in the winter time, set for say 60 degrees fahrenheit, and in fact the temperature in the room is 40? Will the machine actually heat the room, or will it not do anything?

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As above, so below

I think that's a very appliance-dependent question. Most air conditioners I've experienced would just shut off the cooling part if the ambient temperature is less than or equal to the thermostat setting. On the other hand, if you tell the ac in my wife's car that you want 72-degree air, that's exactly what you get even if the outside air it's feeding in is 60 degrees - which can be kind of annoying when all I want it to do is blow the outside air on me as is.

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I'm no expert, but if the heat is higher than the heat setting on the AC it should do nothing, or maybe blow air.

BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GWARP, DON'T USE AN AIR CONDITIONER FOR HEATING IN JAPAN! I did that once and I am now a broken shell of a man. Ten thousand yen! Ten thousand yen! Banzai yen for heating the aparto for one month! Back then that was enough money to buy a half a ton of Australian wheat or a small sack of Japanese rice. I never heated the apartment after that. I bought an electric blanket instead. Sure everything was frozen solid a few times when I woke up, but big deal, you just put liquids in the fridge to keep them warm and stuff you want to keep cold you put in the snowdrift outside your door. And if you wait a while soon enough it will be spring and before long you'll be complaining that it's too darn hot.

Going a bit further, my assumption was that the cooler/heater switch puts the appliance into a different mode. So for example, the heater means that the appliance will use some heating process with coils or something. So I wonder if it's even possible for a machine set on "heating" to take air that is 80 degrees and somehow "heat" it to 70 using a coil. If the appliance doesn't have a switch, then I guess it would automatically decide whether to do heating or cooling. But some air conditions have a setting (or rather, four settings: fan, heat, A/C, and "dry").

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As above, so below

All air conditioners are heat pumps, though most air conditioners used in the U.S. are designed to only extract heat from the interior. Natural gas heating is usually cheaper and available in most locations.

Reversible air conditioners are called "heat pumps" here. There were two on the duplex my family owned, and the thermostat on those could be set with both low and high limits: If the interior temperature went too high, they would extract heat from the interior. Too low and they would reverse and extract heat from the outside.

Early on (decades ago) in the U.S. some companies sold heat pumps that were nothing more than stock air conditioners with valving, etc. that could be reversed. Problem is, a heat pump used for both summer and winter needs to be built tougher than a stock air conditioner, or it will fail quickly. That gave them a bad reputation for a number of years.

By the way, ground source heat pumps can be very efficient (the ground tends to be warmer/cooler than the air in winter/summer), but are expensive to install.

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Actually, our electric bill is a bit over 10,000 yen. . . Actually, the electric company is quite kind, and did say we could pay a month's electricity with our first-born son if we'd prefer.

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As above, so below

If your unit works anything like my heat pump here in Phoenix, turning the dial down with the switch set to Heater will do nothing. If the dial is set to 78f and the house is 83f, the heater figures all's well and stays off.

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You're using it for more than an hour a day? Insanity! Remember you can buy a Giant ice cream cone at the convenience store for 100 yen. Eating that slimey frozen vegetable oil in the snow while waiting at the train station and watching toeless pigeons hop around will give your body the calories it needs to survive sub-zero temperatures without dying.

Not much of an option in most of Japan, between high-rises and volcanic soil...

I knew a gentleman with a heat pump who laid about 180 ft of concrete culvert about two feet below the surface in a back and forth pattern, originating near, and ending at his heat pump. When his unit would come on, a squirrel-cage blower would force air through the culvert, and a shroud between the end of the culvert and the heat pump would ensure 100% made it to the heat pump.

It cut more than 50% off his heating/cooling bills (he had a separate meter installed for his heat pump, and that includes the cost of running the squirrel-cage blower.

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That's essentially making a large inefficient solar power plant.

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