Home LivingSmart HomeThe ultimate UK heatwave beater is a portable air conditioner. Here’s what you need to know…The best portable air conditioners can be life-changing but only if you use them rightWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Home LivingSmart HomeThe ultimate UK heatwave beater is a portable air conditioner. Here’s what you need to know…The best portable air conditioners can be life-changing but only if you use them rightWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
The best portable air conditioners can be life-changing but only if you use them right
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Getty/iStock)
(Image credit: Getty/iStock)
Summertime, and the living is not easy. That’s due to a heatwave raging across multiple continents, making things unpleasantly hot indoors. It’s quite nice outdoors admittedly, but do slap on some sunblock. Air conditioning is one excellent solution to indoor heat, but you need to avoid the air conditioner mistakes that all too many people make. I’m talking here about portable air conditioners as there’s a lot more that can go wrong with them, and also in T3’s native UK, very few homes have permanently installed air conditioning. The weather just doesn’t justify it.
We have a guide to thebest portable air conditioners,and it is unlikely you’ll come across a less sexy-looking batch of gadgets anywhere on the site. However, when your home is a hot mess, you won’t worry about that. Thebest fans– even the very sexiestDyson fans– are not up to the task of cooling a room when it getsreallyhot. If you peruse our list ofmistakes that everyone makes with fans, you’ll find the very first one is ‘expecting a fan to cool your home when it’s hot’.
Very high temperatures are expected to continue for a week in the UK, and are also likely to become more commonplace and frequent due to climate change – unfortunately more widespread use of air conditioning is likely to contribute to that, but more of that later. So now may seem like a good time tobuy a portable air conditioner. But only if you are aware of the mistakes people make with them, and what you need to know before buying one.
1. Not getting a powerful enough unit
(Image credit: AEG, Klarstein)
(Image credit: AEG, Klarstein)
This is pretty fundamental. If your room is 20 meters square, you won’t be able to cool it with an air conditioner built to cool a room that’s 10 meters square at most.
Air conditioners are rated in BTUs. This actually stands for ‘British Thermal Unit’, believe it or not, but it’s a unit that’s used around the world. Long story short, you need to have an appliance with enough BTUs for the space you want to cool.
Nothing is ever that simple, however, and there are also other considerations to be taken into account, including what direction the windows face in said room, what the walls are made of, what type of lighting it uses and so on and so on. That said, BTU ratings do put you in at least the right ball park 90% of the time.
Appliances Direct has this simple guideto the BTU requirements of various room sizes. You can also find more advanced calculators online which take into account all those other factors that can make a room naturally hotter or cooler.
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2. Not positioning the unit correctly
It’s all about the ducting(Image credit: Princess)
It’s all about the ducting
It’s all about the ducting
(Image credit: Princess)
So basically your options are, a) put it near a window and push the far end of the duct out of that window, b) drill a big hole in your wall with a chimney on the outside, and push it through that, or c) get a longer length of ducting.
I suspect only a tiny number of people ever opt for options b) or c) here, but the window option can be tricky. Many portable air conditioners come with adaptors that fill your the gap in your partially opened window, with a hole that the end of the duct fits through. However, these only ever seem to be suitable for sliding windows, not ones with a hinge. Well, they certainly never work with the windows inmyflat, anyway.
If you also find you have this problem, your only option is to push the duct as far out of the window as possible, and direct it away from the window itself, and any other open windows in the vicinity. Otherwise, the hot air you have sucked out of your room will be blown straight back in. In the past, short ducts have left me having to stand air con units on large boxes, in order to get them close enough to the window. I don’t know if this affected their performance, but it sure does look odd. On the other hand, it meant my room was cool while everyone else I knew was sweltering, so I was not that fussed.
I once went to an event held in a basement, where there was a portable air con unit but nowhere at all to run its short length of ducting. So they just turned it on and left it. The area immediately in front of it was very cold, the area behind it was extremely hot, and the net effect on the room overall was zero.
3. Not being aware of the costs involved
In the UK this may sound like an extreme example because it is almost unimaginable that it could be hot all day for an entire month. However, that’s pretty standard in many countries in high summer. Not wanting to guilt trip anyone here, but running an air con unit is expensive because it burns a lot of electricity, and a lot of that will ultimately come from fossil fuels, which means that the planet will heat up more, and you’ll need to use air con more often, and eventually the world will explode and we will all die, which will be a downer.
So please also be aware of the next mistake people make with air con…
4. Not using air con economically
This lady is relaxed, despite looking at her electricity bill online(Image credit: Andrea Piacquadio |Pexels)
This lady is relaxed, despite looking at her electricity bill online
This lady is relaxed, despite looking at her electricity bill online
(Image credit: Andrea Piacquadio |Pexels)
A lot of people buy a portable air conditioner for a few hundred quid/bucks, and set it to something completely unrealistic like 17ºC during a heatwave that sees outdoor temperatures upwards of 30ºC. All this means is that the air con will never reach its target and hence it willneverturn off. Things naturally get better if you buy more expensive units but you should generally look to chill your room to the low to mid 20s rather than going for a genuinely chilled temperature – delicious though that feels when you’ve just come in from a day in the blazing heat.
The other classic mistake people make is to use air con when they feel hot, and run it with the fan on full. As with heating a house, you are actually much better picking a temperature and leaving the air con to achieve and maintain it. This means running the air con non-stop which doesn’t sound very economical but keep in mind that most of the time it will be working only at a low level, or not at all, once the target temperature has been reached.
However, this may become moot at night as most portable air conditioners are pretty bloody loud, and will need to be turned off until you awake. Oh well.
5. Not cleaning your air con
Who wouldn’t want to lavish attention on something as beautiful as this?(Image credit: Amcor)
Who wouldn’t want to lavish attention on something as beautiful as this?
Who wouldn’t want to lavish attention on something as beautiful as this?
(Image credit: Amcor)
I am not a big one for cleaning filters on vacuum cleaners, or anything else come to that. However, it isessentialfor portable air conditioners, if you want them to perform during hot weather. Which, obviously, you do.
You should thoroughly clean all filters and empty any waste water tanks when you bring them out for the summer months and before you put them away when it gets cold. And if the period you’re using them for is going to be longer than a month, you should also do that every month while it’s in use.
Otherwise, when the going gets hot, your air con will not get going. In some cases they won’t work at all, and in most cases they will work but less efficiently, which means they’ll be even more expensive to run, and less effective at cooling your room. And you don’t want that.
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