Save Energy with a Portable Air Conditioner

CLICK HERE to Find the Cheapest Portable Air Conditioner Online

One alternative nowadays to the typical, bulky, window-mounted air conditioner is the lighter, sleeker, modern-looking portable air conditioner. There are plenty of designs to choose from, across many different brands, along with many sizes and here we take a look at some of the features you will need to consider if you are thinking of buying one. Of course, without doing any homework on the matter beforehand you may be making an expensive mistake!

The concept of air conditioning has been with us since the 2^nd Century when a rotary fan was devised by an enterprising Chinese inventor. The modern air conditioning unit began appearing in the first part of the twentieth century and the “art” has been refined and tweaked consistently in the intervening one hundred plus years.

So trying to find new ways to cool down our living and working spaces is nothing new. The emergence of portable air conditioners is the latest in a long line of improvements and choices that we have available to us.

Let’s first look at exactly what these machines are and see who might get the most advantage out of using such items.

Naturally these units come in all shapes and sizes but, being designed to be portable, they tend to be more and more slim-line; the older type of air conditioner used to sit in one place so it didn’t really make much difference how heavy or sizeable they were, but these things move from room to room. This type of unit is built for convenience, but the one you end up buying will partly depend upon the size of room(s) that you are cooling…more later on that.

They are out-of-the-box ready to be switched on. There is no complicated installation process requiring mechanics to visit your house. If you can unpack the carton and find the plug socket then you can operate one of these units and this is one of the beauties of these machines over the traditional type.

Of course the cooling capacities of the machines on the market are a key factor to consider and this will be the single biggest decision you make in the buying process. The cooling capacity varies from the larger portable air conditioners to the smaller ones. They are generally rated by the amount of British Thermal Units (BTUs) they can remove per hour. The units are usually rated between 10,000 and 14,000 BTUs. The power you need will be decided by several factors about the room it is designed to cool, namely the room’s size, whether the sun shines directly into it, the efficiency of the insulation in the room, how many people usually use the room and what exactly the room is used for (for example kitchens generate extra heat so would require a larger unit). Generally, as a guideline, a room of 200-300 square feet, with average usage and levels of sunshine, would need a portable air conditioner of around 12,000 BTU. But please remember to consider closely the properties of the room mentioned above and that will help you

One of the main attractions of these air conditioners is that, if you have a small room you want to cool that has a lot of shade and is only used occasionally by a few people, then a full power, traditional model is probably overkill. By going with the portable option you can save both in the initial outlay of the machine and in the ongoing energy costs. In this day and age of tightening belts, every dollar counts and most of us would appreciate keeping the utility bills, including electricity, as low as possible. If you choose a machine with a high EER rating it means that you are getting a highly energy- efficient machine that will provide more cooling power per dollar for you. Most of the units have several functional settings allowing you to adjust the cooling intensity and thus the energy output.

Perhaps you live in a place where the weather is quite unpredictable – sometimes you seem to be sweltering and other days you are frozen. Maybe you have a small home office or a small guest bedroom that you need to cool at times without warranting a full size unit to stay there permanently. In these cases the portable option will make a lot of sense in terms of providing a comfortable “climate” for work or sleep.

In summary, if you are looking for a cheap portable air conditioner just make sure that it comes with a full warranty and that it is not a poorly made version from an industry lightweight, or you may be disappointed within a few months when it’s not doing the job it was bought to do.

CLICK HERE to Read Lots of Portable Air Conditioner Reviews