The Summer heat is coming! Mouse_Spouse *doesn’t * cope with hot weather very well. The Mouse_Pad has no AC, so Spouse has been miserable, especially at night.
I’m thinking about getting a portable air conditioner. Does anyone have one? Do you like it?
Thanks!
I purchased a roll away unit last year when my rooftop unit went out. It cooled one room fairly well but with nighttime temps reaching the low ninetys you had to be in front of it to get any relief. It cost 500 dollars and I have loaned it to a friend once since then so it was worth it for that at least . I love to help people. The only thing I didn’t care for was that it had a sliding duct that went in the window and I had to seal it with tape to get it airtight. Masking tape that doesn’t leave residue is expensive and I used almost a whole roll sealing it and even then someone could have broken in with just a push. Hope this helps.
The boyfriend has one because his room and office are in an old mill house where the air doesn’t work. It helps, sure - but mostly it works best if you’re sitting down and not doing much. Last Friday when we were trying to clean the place up and it was 97 outside we sweated our balls off. I don’t even have balls.
So, for certain applications, it can be a real help, but it’s not a panacea. If I were pregnant, I’d get one.
Thank you. 
We have an evaporative cooler. Since it has been unusually wet and humid here in Colorado, it hasn’t been of much use. I’m trying to see a roll away ac unit would be better.
If you mean those big ones on wheels, yes, I use one. Two, actually. We have casement windows throughout the house, so I can’t use the cheapo window AC units.
They have to be vented outside, so our solution was to purchase plexiglass inserts that fit in lieu of a screen and have a hole cut to put the vent tube through.
They work really well in my opinion. No, they won’t cool down the whole house, but they’re not made for that. I put them in my office or the bedroom, and they work great.
We purchased them last year when our wedding happened to fall on the only 105 degree day in the summer, and we were having a small party at our house. We had 25+ people in our great room and two of these AC units and it was fine. It’s a pretty big room with high (26’) ceiling, so that’s a pretty big space and a lot of people.
I think the key, though, is properly seating the vent tube. If you don’t have a tight seal, I think the warm air just recirculates.
They are $300 compared to a $100 window unit. Any reason you can’t have a window unit or three? I find they are more effective in cooling.
Also, the portable one I have you have to empty the water that collects pretty often; it stops cooling when the water chamber is full.
But it’s OK for taking the humidity out of the air and doing some cooling.
Also make sure the vent tube is as short as possible to lessen the warming effect on the surrounding air.
We rent a two-story townhome in a covenant controlled community. (Our bedroom is on the second floor, which makes it much warmer in the summer. I wish I knew this when we were looking at the place.) The HOA won’t let us install window units. Also, the windows are open horizontally (you push from left to right, rather than pull up and down), and units for these windows are just as expensive as a portable ac.
Yep, I’ve got those in the bedroom and have rigged up a fan system to pull air from the living room window unit into the bedroom!
Hopefully they won’t mind the exhaust tube stuck in your window?
Exhaust tube? What exhaust tube? 
I missed your winking smiley. Thought you didn’t know they had exhaust tubes.
I’d be interested to know how they produce so many btu’s on 115 volts.
I also have windows that slide sideways, so a normal window unit would be a pain to install, so I bought a portable. It fits a narrow exhaust into a vertical spacer thingy that stays in place through the magical force of gravity. It only cools one room, but it does that fairly well. I have to empty the water tank pretty much once a day. The good part is that on cooler days I can open the window wide to get good air flow, leaving the exhaust in place.
They don’t work as well as window mounted and they cost 3X as much.
It is time to try to get the HOA to change it’s rules.
Some of them have two tubes, one to suck outdoor air in to the unit and the other to return hot humid air to the outdoors.
Others only have that second tube. They use cooled room air to supply the hot side, and blow it outdoors. This is stupid. It sort of works, but that means the AC is also removing room air, and all the warm air in the house is being drawn towards it. As it cools the air around it, the cooling effect has to “swim upstream” against all the warm air migrating its way.
I think manufacturers realized they could sort of get away with eliminating one of the tubes, and people are willing to buy them that way because everybody realizes the tubes are ugly, but few realize the effect of eliminating the one tube.
I have a one-tube model, and it’s almost worthless. I had to buy quickly and no local stores carried a two-tube model. I am afraid the one-tube type is displacing two-tube units from the market and meanwhile helping convince consumers that portable ACs in general don’t work well.
Just a thought, but an acquaintance of mine was pregnant through the summer and sufferred terribly, so getting an air-conditioning unit or two is very likely a good idea.
The reason my grandparents are thinking of one is that these don’t need installation. Once you add unit+installation, that’s a very pretty penny - plus you have to wait for the installer etc. With Spain discovering a/c in the last few years, the waiting list for a/c installers is longer than for dates with Pe.
Both of mine are one-tube models and they work well. They don’t cool down the whole house, but they cool down the room I’m in.
I can’t see the advantage of two tubes. The air outside is warmer than the air inside the house - why would I want to pull that in, cool it, and blow it into the room? Seems better/smarter to recirculate the already cooled air in the room, much like a car when you put the AC on and close the vents at the same time, it gets cooler faster.
>I can’t see the advantage of two tubes. The air outside is warmer than the air inside the house - why would I want to pull that in, cool it, and blow it into the room? Seems better/smarter to recirculate the already cooled air in the room, much like a car when you put the AC on and close the vents at the same time, it gets cooler faster.
The outside air you’d bring in isn’t for cooling and blowing into the room. It’s for heating and humidifying and blowing back outside.
If you don’t use outside air to do this, you have to use inside air. Using inside air means the AC is also an exhaust, like a window fan blowing indoor air out. Therefore, air that’s outside the room (probably in the rest of the house) keeps entering the room to supply this air. Think about it - if the one tube is shooting air out the window, where’s all that air coming from? It comes from the rest of the house, or outdoors, or both, or originally outdoors and then the rest of the house.
All this warm humid air getting drawn into your airconditioned room is warming and humidifying it. Your AC is the last stop this air makes before it goes outside. So the cool zone around your AC is getting vacuumed up and shot outside.
Or think of it another way. Throwing air outdoors means you are taking other air from outdoors eventually, no matter how you do it. So the choices are, you bring it in through a hose so it goes directly to the AC without warming and humidifying your room, or you bring it in without that hose so it does warm and humidify the room.
Finally, you can consider the opposite situation that occurs when you try to heat your house with a fireplace in the winter. All the air that is going to go up the chimney has to enter the house coldmake its way toward the fireplace, cooling you and your living room as it goes. The fireplace fights to spread heat outward, upstream against this flood of cold air.
shrug All I know is that my one-hose model works pretty well. Not as good as a window unit or central air, but either of those would involve extensive remodeling and a lot of money.
My biggest frustration with my one-hose model was using it in my bedroom last summer. We had a very rainy stretch, and my house is in the woods and under trees, and this area is humid anyway. For several days I couldn’t get the relative humidity in my bedroom, where the AC was, under 90%. I could get it cool, but the humidity was horrible. I realized I was rotting from the inside out and went crazy trying to fix it (I have chronic bronchitis and high humidity exacerbates it). Finally I bought a $90 window air conditioner and cut a Lexan plate to hang it in my casement window, and moved the $600 one-hose portable out, and quickly got the RH down to 60%. Then I fiddled some more and set the window AC on low fan and turned its thermostat all the way down to 60 F (or whatever it was), and turned on my baseboard electric heat, and let the heat and the AC fight. This got the humidity down to 40% and I rapidly recovered. If I sound bitter, it’s because I am - I actually harbor resentment towards this stupid inanimate object, and the cheezy design people who did away with the all-important intake hose.