Whynter Almost Destroyed Me

    I sang your praises in my initial review of your product, and apparently I was extremely overzealous. So look, everything I talked about in my "review" (more like a preview, really) of the Whynter Portable A/C with Heat pump is still relevant here, but as much as I raved about the hose-in-hose feature, the engineering of the product was so horribly designed that I wonder if the company - in this case, Midea - even realized what the fuck they did. I can only blame Whynter for about 25% of it, because really all they did was repackage a design that Midea created. But that also gives/gave them the opportunity to re-design it to their specifications and nobody thought to do this. And I'm also not sure, but I don't think the Midea version of this product even has a heat pump feature, and if they don't, then it really is 100% Whynter's engineers' incompetence that I've had to correct for.

    So here's what I mean by this. Let me start out by saying that this winter has been one of the warmest on record, at least since I've been alive, so it took us a while to even start wanting to consistently use the heat pump to heat the bedroom. But once we did, we were running into an issue where the damn thing would turn on, open the louver, and then do absolutely nothing. No fan, no noise, nothing. So, I emailed support. To their credit, they do get back to you very quickly. And what it boiled down to was one of the stupidest things I had ever heard. Apparently, the heat pump feature will not work if it is below 41 degrees outside.

    Excuse me, what? A feature that it supposed to warm up your house when it is cold outside doesn't work when it's below 41 degrees? What the actual fuck?

    Okay, I kind of get it, if you know how heat pumps work (This video from Technology Connections is an amazing deep dive explainer if you are interested) is that they take the heat energy from the cold air and make it hot. It's exactly how and A/C works but in reverse. It's co-efficient of energy is nearly 1:1, which is why I wanted to use it to heat my bedroom, and to also control the warmth of the room better than the shit-tastic old-school thermostats I'm stuck with in this apartment.  When they were originally manufactured, they had an issue with working in very cold temperatures because THERMODYNAMICS. The radiator would freeze over and stop the unit from working. But engineers have overcome this problem for the mini-splits by including a defrost cycle. Also, I just want to point out that I used to own a Hisense portable A/C with heat pump, that had both an intake and exhaust hose, and it worked JUST FINE in the winter. I assume it's because instead of pulling in outside air from the intake hose to heat the room, it would intake the air from the unit itself, like it does in Fan mode (I always hated that fan mode doesn't work by taking in outside air, that would make a lot more sense to me and allow me to use the A/C a lot less often, but I digress). Either one of these solutions would work here but they instead gave me a completely different solution (because the engineers didn't bother to think about these things). Instead, the solution they gave me was to expand the exhaust house out of the hose-in-hose unit, and hook it up to the window kit by itself. Apparently by decoupling the intake hose from the window, it will allow it to intake room air, which would keep the unit above 41 degrees. (Or use Fan Mode, like why wasn't this just coded into the design?!!) But anyway, this already presents two problems.

    1. There is no connector to attach the exhaust hose by itself to the window adapter. When I asked customer service about this, they literally just shrugged their shoulders at me. I am not joking. They said they haven't made anything to help attach those two pieces together and suggested plexiglass (????) for what, I'm not sure. WTF.

    2. THERE IS NOW A GAPING HOLE IN THE WINDOW KIT WHERE THE INTAKE HOSE USED TO BE. This is the biggest mind-fuck of it all. Imagine, it's winter. Like, it's fucking cold outside, you know. You had such good intentions by buying a heat pump to heat your space because you like the environment and it's cheaper to run. But not if it's fighting against the cold air coming through the gaping hole in your window!!! FFS. It's already bad enough, to be honest, to fight against the inevitable leakage of cold air coming in through the window kit regardless of how much tape you use, but this is god damn ridiculous. 

    I was furious at this point, because I paid an extra $200 for this A/C to have a heat pump feature, and I have to now deal with this bullshit to even get it to function. But I was determined to figure something out because dammit, I PAID FOR IT. So, I put tape over the intake hole, and stuffed it with foam and cotton batting. It's not perfect; it looks like shit and it still leaks cold air but at least it works.

    

    But wait, THERE'S MORE! Yes, the incompetence of the engineers is not over yet, my friends. Because after I fixed this issue, I was presented with another. I am shaking with fury as I write this because this could have all been avoided if they programed the fucking thing to intake room air when running in Heat Mode. I attempt to turn on the unit in the night because it got cold, and it wouldn't turn on. According to the app, it was under 41 degrees inside. How is that, you might ask, when the intake hose is now inside the house? (Takes a deep breath), the exhaust hose is just sitting in the window, as as it sits there, cold air is just slithering its way down it and settling inside the unit. I scream into the void. Why was this never an issue with my Hisense unit? Why would a $400 piece of shit work better than this?!

    I don't bother to email customer service this time. I had already sent a long-winded email that was not super friendly letting them know my feelings on this thing. So again, here I am figuring it out myself. 

    And I do - I have an epiphany. 

    Fan mode pulls in room air, right? Well now, if I run the fan for just a couple of minutes, it will blow out all the cold air that settled inside the unit and replace it with warmer room air. And this actually works. I use their app to set a schedule, 6 times a day the fan will run for 2 minutes each time, blowing out any cold air so that when the temperature drops inside the room to 61, it will turn on unencumbered. After all this fucking effort, it finally works like it's supposed to. No thanks to Whynter or their "engineers". 

    I just can't fathom that nobody else in the world has run into this issue. Maybe I'm a unique case because I like to keep my bedroom temp between 62-64 degrees. I sleep hot, and I get warm way too easily. Maybe people that use this as a real heat pump to keep their entire house warm don't run into this? I mean, I don't know why not, but I can't possibly be the only one!

    So in the end, I can still pretty much recommend the Whynter A/C without heat pump, which is, luckily, $200 less, unless I run into some weird-ass issue during the summer months. I guess we'll see!

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!