Portable Air Conditioners
Portable air conditioner isn’t that portable which you can carry around like a briefcase, but is still quite compact and is on wheels to make it easy to move it around from one room to another in a office or a house with ease. Today you can easily get portable air conditioners with 1,800 to 18,000 watts output, and many advanced units come with built-in heaters for winters.
Basically, there are two types of portable air conditioning units: refrigerative and evaporative.
Refrigerative portable air conditioning units are of two types: those with hoses and “split” units. Both of them have compressors and use the atmospheric air for exchanging heat as with other air conditioning units. They dehumidify and cool the room air. They generate hot air, which is vented out in the surroundings, and also collect water that condenses from the cooled air.
Evaporative units are also referred to as swamp cooler, which is actually a misnomer as they work best at places with low humidity. This unit does not have any condenser or compressor. Water is evaporated on the cooling fins and releases vapor. This evaporating water then absorbs the latent heat of vaporization, thereby cooling the air.
The biggest advantage of evaporative portable air conditioner is that there is no need for hose to vent outside the area that is being cooled and they cost much less than traditional window or split air conditioning units. Aside from this, they use less energy than usual air conditioning units.
The biggest benefit of portable air conditioner is that it can be directly placed in a room that is to be cooled thereby reducing the cooling cost to a great extent. Being portable, it is easy to move portable air conditioner around the house or office to a place that is to be cooled. There is no need to have more than one unit in a house as it can be moved to any place within a building.
Another benefit of portable air conditioner is that it brings down your energy bills even when it is used throughout the day. This is possible because it is used for cooling only the area that needs to be cooled unlike split air conditioning units that cool the entire house or office building whether the individual rooms in it are being used or not.
Installation of portable air conditioner is not as expensive as windows or split air conditioning units. Portable units can even be installed by you as you just have to attach a hose to the unit and other end of this hose is fitted onto a separate window kit. Mostly a window is opened and kit is placed on the top of it.
Today there are numerous air conditioning options and portable air conditioners are now more practical and functional than ever, and have been successful in eliminating the need for traditional window units and provide targeted cooling in the desired area only. Portable air conditioner that is available in the market today is much more efficient and aesthetically pleasing than traditional split or window units and come with various innovative functions and remote control facility.