Over Compensate Much?

     Let's say you live in an apartment and they've decided to ban in-window air-conditioning units. So this limits you to a portable A/C if you want one. Now let's say you live on the first floor, and the view from all your windows in the apartment is the parking lot that has night time lights on all night, and you have a husband that works night shift so he sleeps during the day. You've tried putting a fan in the window to help cool the room down but alas, it reminds you of those dingy underground hideouts where you see shadows of large fan blades moving across your walls. Not to mention the occasional flash of headlights. During the day you have typical apartment noises, but since your window is feet from a main walkway to the garbage and mail, there is constantly people going by.

    In addition to all this nonsense, your apartment is so oddly laid out that getting air moving from one room to another is nearly impossible. You have 1 sliding glass door in the living room (everything faces the parking lot), and a window in each bedroom. That's it. The airflow is basically non-existent. 

    So what do you do? You overcompensate! I want to firstly say that these blackout "blinds" are a lifesaver, as they're covering the entire bedroom window, in addition to the A/C's vent hose because it glows like a beacon in the middle of the night. We bought a portable A/C that is also a heat pump so that we can keep it in the window all year round. It's possible that as much as we try our best to seal the window, air still leaks in and it might be fighting against that, but it's better than a heater register that doesn't understand when to shut the f*ck off when it gets to a set temperature. And actually, as I write this in October, and probably well into November, we'll still be running the A/C on cool. It's such a waste of energy because it's most definitely colder outside than it is inside, and if A/C's could use the "Fan" function by bringing in cold air from outside that would solve this issue but alas, there are no other options if we want the room dark and quiet. We keep the bedroom door closed at all times and have a draft thingie under the door, but the room temp still rises (even in the middle of the night) despite the fact it's cold outside and the window is (essentially) open.

    So onto the A/C itself. I bought a Whynter 14000 BTU A/C (12,000 SACC/DOE, which basically means "real world usage") with heat pump. As you can see from the pic above, our bedroom is not that massive, it's 169 square feet, but we do have 9 ft ceilings which is pretty rare for apartments. I bought this unit for several reasons (our old one kicked the bucket recently and it was a typical cheap, dual hose unit, 10,000 BTUs)

    1. The Hose-n-hose feature. This is available only in the highest end units, and
I was getting so tired of our janky set up with the two hoses stretched off to the side. The exhaust hose was covered with an insulator to help avoid heat getting back into the room before it's exhausted out, while the intake hose had been wrapped in layers of aluminum tape to stop the light bleed.

    2. The inverter. Again, only the highest end units have this feature, as I'm sure it's expensive to produce. It allows the A/C to ramp the speed of the compressor up and down as needed, instead of cycling on and off constantly, which not only saves energy, but also extends the life of the compressor. As a bonus to this, it is also extremely quiet. (As an example, we briefly bought a Hisense dual hose portable A/C 8000 BTU unit - spoiler alert, it was DOA - and it has an energy star sticker on it of $169 a year to run. In comparison, this unit, even though it is 14000 BTUs, had a sticker of just $65 a year to run.)

    

I know it doesn't look bad from this photo [left] but all the jankyness was hidden behind the curtain

As a side note, I am well aware of the A/C rule of sizing your unit to your space. It's annoying when everything is listed in square footage, and they don't take into account the height of your ceilings. When you convert sq ft to cubic feet, that 169 turns into 1521 feet, and the unit is rated for 600 sq feet. Plus, like I already mentioned above, the things I wanted for my portable A/C were only available in their highest end model. So I'm hoping the inverter saves the compressor so that it won't die early from short cycling.

    3. Evaporative Drainage. This is a big one. Our old unit had to be placed on a stool with a hose running to a bucket to allow water to constantly drain. Not only was it unsightly, but sometimes we'd forget about the bucket and we'd have water overflowing onto the carpet. There was more than once I had to take my hair dryer to it. This unit doesn't need to be drained in A/C or Dry modes (unless it's super humid, but we don't live in a super humid environment), but it *does* need to be drained in Heat mode. Although, it has some kind of pump where we can drain it from the middle plug (instead of the one on closest to the floor) just when it needs it. I'm not sure how much it holds or how often it will need to be done, but it sounds pretty simple and we won't need to have the bucket around all the time.

    This thing is so darned efficient that it cools the room in less than 10 minutes. Granted, it *is* colder outside than it is inside, so it's not fighting the heat, but I can't imagine it having a hard time. The only issue I feel we will run across is in the summer months, once it gets above 85 degrees, we like to open the bedroom door and add a fan so we can try to get that cold air to the rest of the apartment. But the way our bedroom/window is set up, its not at all facing the door like the old one was, and we can't make it due to the way the hose works. It was already hard enough, because as you can see from the schematics, there is a 90 degree bend outside of the door. So getting air out is already a chore, and the old 10,000 BTU unit worked it's butt off for not much payoff [our whole apartment is 1100 sq ft though!] We'll see if this 14000 BTU unit can do better. We're counting on you, Whynter!