They are built for different jobs
Comfort cooling exists to make people comfortable. It targets a pleasant temperature for an office, runs when the space is occupied, and is designed around the modest, intermittent heat that people and lighting produce. Precision cooling exists to hold a machine room within a tight band of temperature and humidity, continuously, against a heat load that is dense, constant and concentrated.
Those are not the same problem, and equipment designed for one does not do the other well. Dropping a domestic or office split unit into a server room is a false economy that shows up as hot spots, condensation, short-cycling and premature failure.
Sensible heat, humidity and the SHR
IT equipment produces almost entirely sensible heat — heat that raises air temperature — and very little moisture. Comfort units are designed to remove a lot of latent heat (humidity) because that is what people and outside air bring; a large fraction of their capacity goes to dehumidifying. In a server room there is little humidity to remove, so much of a comfort unit’s rated capacity is simply wasted, and its aggressive dehumidification can dry the room until static becomes a risk.
Precision units are built with a high sensible heat ratio: nearly all of their capacity goes to removing the sensible heat the equipment actually produces, while holding humidity in a controlled band rather than driving it down. That is why a precision unit’s "usable" cooling for an IT load is far closer to its rated figure than a comfort unit’s is.
Continuous duty and airflow
A machine room’s heat load does not clock off in the evening, so its cooling cannot either. Precision units are designed for continuous, year-round operation and for the airflow volumes a dense room needs to avoid hot spots. Comfort units are not built for 24/7 duty; run one that way and its service life shortens dramatically.
Airflow management matters as much as raw capacity. Getting cold air to the front of the equipment and hot exhaust back to the units — through raised floors, containment or careful layout — is often the difference between a room that holds temperature and one that fights itself. Capacity on paper means nothing if the air does not reach the load.
Redundancy and monitoring
Cooling is a critical system, so it needs the same redundancy thinking as power. A room designed so that it stays within tolerance when one unit is offline — for a fault or for planned maintenance — is a room that does not become an emergency the first time a compressor trips. Precision systems also lend themselves to monitoring: temperature and humidity trends give early warning of a developing problem long before an alarm.
The bottom line
For a Kenyan data centre, server room or other equipment-dense space, comfort cooling is not a cheaper version of precision cooling — it is the wrong tool. The right question is not "what air-conditioner fits the wall" but "what heat load, humidity band and redundancy does this room need", and then specifying to that. A cooling survey answers it properly.