Is a Portable Air Conditioner Worth it?
3 pros!
Portable A/Cs work in a pinch, but they aren't a long-term solution.
Before adding a portable air conditioner to your stock of in-home appliances, you should know it’s likely you won’t use it often.
A portable air conditioner is exactly what it sounds like: a free-standing portable cooling device, roughly the size of a space heater. If you’re moving or if your home’s regular A/C suddenly stops working in the middle of summer, having a portable standalone air conditioner can be the difference between sleeping soundly in a comfortable 75 degrees or laying awake in the middle of the night, wondering how to cool down a room if the temperature doesn't drop below 80.
But you shouldn’t count on a standalone portable air conditioner, which costs between $100 and $500, to cool your entire house. It's a stopgap while you hire an HVAC expert.
“Would I ever use it to try to be the solution to my A/C? Never,” says David Hill, owner of Certified Climate Control in Orange City, Florida.
Some HVAC contractors loan out portable units while repairing or replacing air conditioners. (Photo courtesy of Certified Climate Control)
Beating the heat - briefly
Hill’s company has 12 standalone portable air conditioners that he loans to customers when it takes longer than a day to repair or install a new A/C. When an air conditioner goes out in Florida, Hill says he wants it fixed as quickly as possible; having the portable units means Hill can help his customers stay cool until he completes the job.
“People’s air conditioners break, and they go with whoever can get (the job) done the fastest,” Hill says. “If you’re a good company, you’re busy.”
Free-standing portable air conditioners can cool an average-sized room to about 75 degrees on an 85 to 95 degree day, Hill says.
Some people also use standalone portable A/Cs to cool garages, screened-in porches or other areas near their house that they have to keep cool during the summer, says Dan Welkin, marketing representative for Precision Comfort in Westfield, Indiana.
But if you want to cool more than one room at a time, you’ll need to buy more units. “A portable air conditioner isn’t the final solution,” Welkin says.
More maintenance, more problems
That’s because the portable units require more maintenance than a traditional A/C.
For an air conditioner to truly cool your home, there has to be a way to remove hot air and exhaust that’s created by the appliance. Many portable units have tubes that can route the hot air through a window, but it’s a short-term solution, Hill and Welkin say. This is why, if you see a unit marketed as a ventless portable air conditioner, it's probably not truly ventless or an air conditioner, but rather either requires a tube or is actually an evaporative cooler.
“If you have a tube hanging out of your window, that’s temporary,” Welkin says.
Air conditioners also create condensation when they’re on, so most portable A/Cs have a drip pan, similar to the kind you’ll find under a portable refrigerator, and that pan has to be emptied every few hours.
“That is extremely inconvenient in the long term,” Hill says.
