Fujitsu General Ltd announced four new series of home air conditioners, the company's first air conditioners equipped with a presence sensor.
Since about 2007, there has been a trend of employing a power saving function for high-grade home air conditioners so that they detect the users' movement by using a human detection sensor and efficiently operate based on it. Fujitsu General fell behind the competitors in adopting this function, but the company provided it not just in the high-end models for use in living rooms but also in the models for small rooms.
The pyroelectric infrared sensor in the new air conditioners was developed in collaboration with Nippon Ceramic Co Ltd, which is known for its contribution to the air conditioning system for Toyota Motor Corp's Lexus.
The horizontal sensitivity range of the sensor is 120° (about 10m in linear distance), according to Fujitsu General. While air conditioners manufactured by some of the competitors feature a sensor that moves 160° in a horizontal direction or have the horizontal sensitivity range of 160° Fujitsu General commented as follows.
"Our sensor can be fixed at a desired angle when the air conditioner is installed," said Tsunenao Kosuda, corporate vice president and domestic sales manager of Fujitsu General. "According to our survey, more than 90% of home air conditioners are installed in the corner of the wall. When the air conditioner is positioned as such, the detection range sufficiently covers the entire room as long as the sensor is facing toward the center of the room."
With this sensor, Fujitsu General realized a power-saving operation where the preset temperature is automatically lowered when people are actively moving in a room being heated and it is raised when people are not actively moving in a room being cooled. Furthermore, the air conditioners are designed to be turned down 10 minutes after the user exits the room and resume the previous operation when the user returns. If the user does not come back, they are turned off after three hours.
"This function reduces waste of energy, for example, when the user exits the room for a short period of time to talk on the phone or when the user leaves home without turning off the air conditioner," said Hideji Kawashima, Fujitsu General's corporate vice president and technical manager of air conditioning systems.
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