I was just re-reading my post about the Home Depot bucket AC thing. It dawned on me that that contraption will actually heat your house, not cool it. The best you could hope for is to cool one room, and then move that heat to your kitchen where you re-freeze the jug of water. But since you’re freezing the water with a regular Fridge/Freezer* it’s going to release it’s heat back into your house, plus add some more for the work it takes to do that. Also the fan on top of the bucket will create heat. These two things will create a net increase in heat. And it’s not negligible, the system just simply isn’t designed to remove heat from the room, it’s just blowing cool air in the immediate area while generating warm air a few feet away. It’s like a really poorly designed dehumidifier.
*In a commercial freezer (or even your AC), like you see at a grocery store, the compressors are outside so they remove the heat to the outdoors.
Isn’t the “conditioning” in air conditioning the removing of moisture? The cooling is basically a side effect of removing moisture, correct? Our heat is usually a very moist heat so this is important for us as well.
We literally don’t have any outside wall space big enough to put in an A/C unit. The ductless systems are possible for us only because we can put them on interior walls.
We take ours out every fall and put them in the basement. Leaving them up in the winter would block the sunlight we need and make the rooms pretty cold. The small ones are easy to move but the big A/C is a pain the butt to move.
No, I think, depending on circumstances, either the cooling or the dehumidifying effect might be most important. I mean, when I was visiting Arizona it was certainly a dry heat, as they say, but I sure as heck wanted some cooling from the triple digit temps outside. If you’re living in a former swamp like Chicago, though, dehumidifying might be more important.
I have used one for three summers with no problem, but I don’t move it from room to room. It will not instantly cool down a room - it works best if you turn it on a few hours before the room heats up.
I have also found that placing a small fan backwards in a window on the opposite side of the room from the A/C unit helps immensely. It draws the hot air out of the room, “pulling” in the cool air from the A/C.
If the room you are trying to cool has west-facing windows, it also helps to use sun-blocking curtains during the heat of the day.