Setup is super easy - only one hose to the window, much less fiddly than those two-hose designs where you attach one hose and the other pops off.

Customers actually do like this air conditioner.Īnd hey, this air conditioner has a lot going for it! Thereâs wheels on the bottom, so itâs very portable. If most customers noticed how bad this air conditioner is, I do not think a 4.7 rating would be sustainable. There are only 4 one-star reviews (out of 104). The reviews shown on the product page are all âverified purchaseâ, and mostly 5-stars. That phenomenon is itself a rich source of insight, but not the point of this post, and definitely not enough to account for the popularity of this air conditioner. One aspect of the story, presumably, is fake reviews. How does such a bad design end up so popular? The real fact of interest is that this is apparently the top rated new air conditioner on Amazon. Ok, thatâs amusing, but the point of this post is not physics-101 level case studies in how not to build an air conditioner. Probably not what one wants from an air conditioner! The actual effect of this air conditioner is to make the space right in front of the air conditioner nice and cool, but fill the rest of the house with hot outdoor air. And presumably that air being pulled in from outside is hot one typically does not use an air conditioner on cool days. In practice, houses are very not airtight (we donât want to suffocate), so air from outside will be pulled in through lots of openings throughout the house. In order for the room to not end up a vacuum, air has to come back into the room from outside. The hot air, it blows out the window.Īir is blowing out the window. The cool air, it blows back into the room. It splits that air into two streams, and pumps heat from one stream to the other - making some air hotter, and some air cooler. Key thing to notice: there is one hose going to the window. However, this air conditioner has a major problem.

Thereâs a couple pages of evaporative coolers (not what Iâm looking for), one used window unit (?), and then this: I go to Amazon, search for âair conditionerâ, and sort by average customer rating.

The wirecutter