Buying an Air Conditioner? Portable AC May Not Be The Best Choice

If you have been in the market trying to buy the best portable air conditioner, then you will want to read this article very carefully. It will focus on the disadvantages of air conditioners, portable, small or cheap, that you need to consider before buying. If you don't consider these, you may end up with an ineffective, electricity devouring cooler in the best case scenario, and with a useless piece of scrap metal in the worst case scenario. So listen up!

There are legitimate uses for portable air conditioners for sure

For instance, when your building code disallows mounting through-the-wall air conditioners, or window air conditioners, and central air conditioning is out of question too, getting a portable AC unit will make sense. However, before hopping on line and getting one, checkout the disadvantages and pitfalls as well so you can choose wisely and not throw your money out the window, together with the hot air.

Are all portable air conditioners created equal?

But are all portable air conditioner units created equal? Not at all. They differ in their cooling power, expressed in BTU, or British Thermal Units, and you need to pick a unit that is sized properly for your room or house that you intend to cool with the portable unit.

Disadvantages of portable air conditioning units

First off, for the most part and for the units above 5000 BTU, the word "portable" is quite a stretch. With one or two hoses, the window attachment, and the weight well into the 60, 70, 80 or more pounds, the only reason why they can be called portable is the set of four caster wheels. But moving the unit around and then remounting the hoses is no picnic.

And secondly, these same air hoses that come with mini portable AC units are likely to be highly inflexible, so you can practically forget about keeping the portable AC unit close to the window. It will likely take up some significant amount of prime real estate towards the middle of the room.

Pitfalls of portable AC units

Now, granted, one can manage the disadvantages of the portable AC units, but there are some pitfalls of buying portable air conditioning units as well. And the biggest one of them is:

Many manufacturers are still producing single hose air conditioning units. Some well informed industry insiders are claiming these manufacturers belong in the "engineering jail" for their insisting on selling single hose units on the air conditioning market place. These units are

1. Power hungry


2. They do not provide much comfort and cooling


3. They will run on high power and thus will have comparatively short life span

You can remove all these problems by simply purchasing a dual-hose portable air conditioning unit. How does a single extra hose make so much difference you ask?

That is a great question. In short, running a single hose portable air conditioner is like running a car air conditioner in a car that has all windows rolled down. Or, it is half as bad as running your refrigerator with the refrigerator door open.