I watched that immediately after buying a portable air conditioner. Thankfully, too, because I think he oversells the inefficiency and effectiveness of portable air conditioners. It's very easy to leave that video thinking you shouldn't bother with one, but the reality is that they're actually pretty damned good machines. Window-mounted units are marginally better, sure, but if that's not an option or you live a place that doesn't stay hot for very long, then they're fine, your electric bill is just a little higher. Which is fine for me because there's two months out of the year I need A/C and the alternative is a fan.
Living in a hoa that is loaded with some weird rules... I'm stuck with a portable as traditionals are not allowed. As per noise this was a happy find overtime. A dog of mine developed thunder and fireworks issues. The noise of the ac running helped filter out the thunder/fireworks. Eventually I gravitated towards something more powerful and a bit more expensive and did some self adjusting to the machine bypassing the temperature min so to have the a/c just run continously when I needed it to. This means a room that is typically 51-52ish.
The A/C in an apartment I was living in in Texas failed one summer, and the management firm put one like that in my bedroom temporarily.
Noisy and inefficient is a good description. Granted, it had to run off a regular 15A outlet so it was never going to be as powerful as the one in the attic. But it made sleeping possible by getting the temperature below 85F (30C).
After watching that video, I decided to relocate my portable air conditioner. The exhaust tube is now super short, directly mounted to a hole in the wall, and insulated to compensate for the inefficiency of these type of devices. It made all the difference.
The content might be interesting, but it's way too long. The guy goes on way too many tangents and adds way too much filler. You probably can boil the whole video down to a few bullet points, yet it's 16 minutes long.
Ugh, clickbait title. TL;DW get a dual hose model. Mine was $260 from Craigslist. In the video he even says he uses two portable AC's. He backpedals further in his description:
> Seriously, either we need to get more awareness of how dumb single-hose portable A/C units are, or we need to just use window units whenever possible. While I know that there are times a portable unit is the only option (remember, I’m in that boat), it seems that only very high capacity, premium machines have the facility to use two hoses. Which is frankly stupid but then again that’s what I’m trying to tell you now.
Yes, you "shouldn't like them," unless it's you're only option, like in his case.
It looks like Edgestar is a company that makes a pretty wide variety of HVAC equipment and prioritizes support. That makes a lot of sense for larger orders, especially for a design/build company. I love finding these kinds of companies, that focus on customer service. It's what made Amazon so special, at least back in the day.
I was going to say the same thing. The idea that the customer service rep actually has the ability to talk to product engineering is pretty incredible.
This is interesting. We collectively spend _so much_ of our energy on heating and cooling buildings, and there's very little change happening.
The problems identified in the article are such low hanging fruit. Everywhere you look in residential housing there's huge efficieny gains to be made, but very little effort is going in to making them.
I'd love to find ways we can use technology to make housing more efficient. We need to - it's such a crucial pillar in dealing with climate change, and the vast majority of housing is so comically inefficient. The single tube air conditioners mentioned in the article are just the icing on the cake of all these massive energy wastes we accept because they're marginally more convenient. Does anyone know how to fix this?
There's honestly a lot happening and changing. Obviously you won't see it by buying "HVAC" junk from a box store. What this person should have done is paid an actual HVAC tech to install a ductless mini-split [0]. It would have been a heck of a lot more efficient. He states his one unit is drawing 10 amps (110 volt I assume). Whereas my american standard 4 ton (48,000 btu) unit draws 10 amps as well (240 volt) and cools a 2200 square ft house in 100+ degree texas weather with an electric bill usually not higher than $120 per month (1200 - 1400 kwh or so).
By comparison, at my old house (which was half the size, 1100 sq ft) with a much older 12 Seer unit, my electric bill was regularly over $200. I measured that unit at drawing 18 amps (at 240 volt) and it was only a 3 ton 36,000 btu out door unit. The latest and greatest 21/22 seer units are even more efficient than my current one mentioned above (which is probably only 17 seer).
> The single tube air conditioners mentioned in the article are just the icing on the cake of all these massive energy wastes we accept because they're marginally more convenient. Does anyone know how to fix this?
I'm using one of those portable units because I live in a rented apartment. There is nothing convenient about it compared to a much more efficient real (split) AC, but I have no other options.
Even if the landlord was OK with allowing it, "green" laws intentionally make it incredibly tedious and expensive to get the permits to install an AC, so people swarm to the option they can get without paperwork.
Builders spend money on things that make them profit and home buyers don't particularly evaluate efficiency.
After that you figure out how to spend public money on lower efficiency structures. Fraught, but spend money where it's likely to pay off and it probably works out okay.
The minimum standards for a portable AC should be a dual-hose one. Single hose ACs make no sense; it is like throwing a lot of efficiency away, just to look a bit sleeker and a very slight increase in installability and mobility.
Also who in their right minds in Europe decided to rate single hose AC at A+, or A efficiency levels; the same as a good split AC?
Single hose portables should all start with an F to educate a potential customer as to how dumb this device design is.
Perhaps they are giving the same ratings because, actually, the efficiency difference is not that significant? Or do you think they are handicapping the ratings in some way?
100% agree. In summary, in my stupidity and ignorance I got one of those units for the office with my boss' money, whereas I could have had a passively cooled working place. If all of those units were labeled F for Friggin-retarded-noise-and-cooling-levels, it would have made me look into alternatives, because I did totally look at the energy label and noise level and the vast majority was very similar. I figured this was as good as it gets.
Non-summary version:
In the office, the sun bakes the roof to make our rooms a good bit hotter than outside, open windows or no. I was there for my interview on one of the hotter days that year and decided right then and there that either the company was going to buy an AC or I was. It ended up being the company, but I was fairly insistent about needing one so the money was kind of spent for me. If it had been my money, I'd have considered it a sunk cost and good lesson.
It took about one day of using the device for me to start to wonder about its working principles. I mean, I roughly knew: I own a fridge after all. One side gets hot and you cool it with air that is then blown outside; the other side is cold and you use it to cool air that is then blown into the room. But I hadn't really thought about it until after we owned one:
How can this thing have only one hose? What is the air that it blows out replaced by?
I asked that question out loud in the office and, yeah, given that it only blows hot air out, it must be creating negative pressure in the room and basically sucking that hot outside air back into the room. It's nonsensical. I even sketched out for a friend how it should work instead because they didn't get my issue. Turns out I reinvented the dual host system (which I never heard of until today).
To make matters worse, the ground floor apartment I moved into at the same time as starting to work there is amazing: it remains 22-24°C during the summer, also after 2 weeks of 35+°C outside (thick walls and shaded from the sun; no air conditioning involved at all). I didn't know that was possible.
If I had known that it would be fine to work from home for a few weeks per year and that my apartment would be super cool (literally and figuratively), I would never have insisted on some kind of air conditioning to try and counteract 20kW of sunlight[1] hitting the office windows and roof. I could have saved a ton of power/CO2 and quite a bit of money. To make matters worse, we didn't use to be under the roof, we used to have only morning sun through the windows. It was only slightly cooler than the new place, but this unit could actually manage to cool the room down.
But now we've chosen this course and I feel too guilty to say that we should just consider it a sunk cost, I'm not going to use it, it's so loud I can hardly concentrate, and I'll just work elsewhere during the hottest weeks. Can't do it. Recently, one of our smaller windows was replaced with some insulated plates with a hole cut out exactly for the AC hose in an attempt to make it work better. I think it does work better because it's less leaky than the flexible thing we had before to put in the window crack, but it's still a huge waste and we keep sinking money into this shitty "solution".
I don't even get it. Like, how hard is it to put a horizontal piece of foam in the hose and have the dual hose system in one hose? Make sure the hot side is on top and put fins at the end of the top half to make the hot air be blown upwards. May not be as efficient as having them be in separate hoses, but wouldn't that be a lot better? It's also not as if you'd be putting cold air next to hot air: it's about the already-hot outside air that would be running alongside the slightly hotter waste-heat air.
I have spent a LOT of time researching using a small window AC unit converted to work in a camper van without cutting a giant hole in a wall. There's a fellow on Youtube[1] that did this successfully, and he's the only known example of it that I've seen, and he was only able to because was he a professional HVAC technician and had several unique tools you'd never own if you weren't an HVAC tech.
which is a perfect product, except that it costs $4000 and still uses 20% more power than some of the smallest window units. It's ridiculous that the major difference between this $4000 unit and a $150 window AC is that the $4k version has a rubber hose connecting the compressor to the condenser coils instead of the typical thin copper pipe. I am sure there are other differences - it uses better components that are more suited to a moving vehicle with shocks and vibrations, has a strong compressor to deal with the longer hose length, and is already adapted to run off of 12V. But a $3850 price difference is ridiculous.
As the fellow on Youtube has shown (it's been in his camper van for years without a problem) there's really no reason the components from a $150 window unit won't work.
Whenever I finally do a camper van build I'm going to find an HVAC tech who can help me with a couple steps (mostly removing and then re-adding refrigerant) and convert the copper pipes to PTFE lined stainless braided hoses attached to SAE fittings. It may not work, and I've heard finding an HVAC tech to work on weird projects is very difficult, but I want to give it a try.
This might be a stupid question: couldn't you just modify the AC unit already in your van to run off whatever power source you wanted to run your window unit off of?
I know someone with a Home Depot residential style mini-split mounted on the back of their cargo trailer RV conversion. Probably too much for a van, but no huge hole in the wall.
The magic product the writer is looking for does exist — somewhat. It's those Euro style mini-split heat pumps, that pump coolant through an external unit.
Up front cost is higher, but the efficiency gains are huge, and they can cool/heat much faster.
The temp vs run duration doesn't seem that meaningful. It shows the first 3 minutes of runtime, and doesn't show if all configurations reach equilibrium performance after that. It looks like they might. These things are usually run for hours, is there a chance they'd have similar cooling performance at that length?
It seems to not be considering "can it reach a temperature", but "how much heat can it remove in 3 minutes", which, IMO, considering constant power usage, is more valuable for "how efficient is this"
Years ago I bought a used (portable) evaporative cooler for $25. When the temperature is not higher than, say, 85F, it is very effective in the day. I do not live in a dry climate. During the day it's 20-50% humidity, and gets high at night. It's clearly a lot less effective at night, but it's usually cool anyway at night.
Window air conditioners work great, but if you can't have that, consider an evaporative cooler if you can get one at a decent price. Do make sure you get one with a decent air flow as well as a decent sized tank (e.g. one where you can run it all night without the water running out in the middle).
Probably won't work well in humid Midwest or South/East.
Anyone else "back in the day" would buy portable air conditioners from the hardware store and sling them into your server broom cupboard in an attempt to keep things from overheating.
It got so boring when we rebuilt with proper falso floors ceilings and real racks.
It's not really a hack is it? More like a fix or an optimization. I was excited for a second cause I have a single hose portable AC and I've been thinking about "hacking" it with an intake hose.
However, the more I use the thing the more I realize that there's nothing wrong with it. Since the rest of the house isn't air conditioned there are open windows and fans throughout. Air is more likely to be drawn in from the rest of the house than through the cracks to the outdoors. Might be an issue in a sealed studio apt, but in our leaky shoebox of a ranch style home, it's hardly the biggest inefficiency.
This is really cool. Maybe there is a market opening for an open, hackable aircon unit?
One thing I've long wanted to try with mine is use 'heating mode' as a quieter version of cooling mode. They work the same - the unit just runs backwards, with the cold air coming out of the tube instead of the vents - so in theory you can cool your bedroom without having the noisy aircon in the same room. But the thermostat doesn't work properly in this case, because it thinks it's trying to raise the temperature of whatever room you put it in, not cool the other end of the tube, so for this to work properly you need to hack the control board.
Tangentially related, but how do you find portable ACs that work reasonably and reliably? I always found it so hard to search for them because it always seems like the reviews on these are difficult to trust. I've had at least one bad experience with one of them (single-hose) where it would just blow warm humid air sometimes, which was strictly worse than not running it at all. (At least something that might cool the air nearby consistently would be something useful, even if it can't cool the whole room.) I realize single-hose is probably a bad idea but somehow I don't have much faith in dual-hose either.
It seems to me that portable units are all kind of equally meh. Seem to be about 50% as good as a window unit (which is about 50% as good as a mini-split or whole-home AC in my opinion). The dual-hose units don't seem to be a whole lot better than the single-hose units, honestly. Considering getting someone to professionally install a mini-split in my apartment to replace two portable units (1hose and 2hose).
I have a dual-hose version that looks very similar to OP's. I use it on-and-off when it gets hots. It can keep a poorly insulated bedroom cool, or two rooms bearable. It's loud to the point that I worry slightly about hearing damage if I sleep with it running, but as an AC, it's worked for several years.
> Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
>
Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
>
Security technicians: takes a deep swig of whiskey I wish I had been born in the neolithic.
One thing with dual hose ACs that I would also like to see improved is an extension of the exhaust hose. For me often the hot air will heat up the window which then radiates heat back into the room. We do have 1980s aluminum framed windows, which really makes that problem worse.
I did find a big improvement in getting duct insulation and wrapping the exhaust hose in that. For the window portion, I cut out an insulating foam board to mount the hoses, and taped the outside edge with reflecting tape. It's keeping my large bedroom around 76, unless it gets above 95 and will start creeping to low 80s.
Wonder why there's no "n" designs for obstructive light. Regardless, there's no reason for portable AC, even duo hose ones due to length limitations on hose before inefficiencies. More effort into easy to install window / split units please.
With WFH widely accepted, I wonder if transhumance will regain popularity?
(In my area, the herds would move between valley floor, mid-mountain, and alps. Most people would move between valley floor and mid-mountain. Peasant banking started here when everyone sent their cows up to the same alp, and the resulting cheese had to be divvied up between the owners and the alp crew.)
Dual hose units are increasingly hard to find. Hardly anybody makes them anymore. I've read in a couple places that they don't work great, despite that window units do.
This particular model will not cool below 60F/16C. Even if it could, the point of a portable A/C is to avoid cutting holes in the wall, which is not relevant if you're building a custom enclosure.
In theory, you could build an insulated box with a mini-split or window/wall unit, but they're probably all optimized for cooling a large space, not freezing a small space.
Get a deep freeze. It costs very little energy to cool an insulated box that only opens at the top. Mechanically, they are simple as hell so not very expensive either.
I attempted something similar, at least on the nest side of things. I quickly realized the nest wouldn’t recognize any attached equipment unless connected to a 24vac line. I always wondered how the nest derived DC power to charge its internal battery when a common line was not used. Maybe I’ll research this some more and try again.
[+] [-] slig|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c3534l|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johntfella|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiph|5 years ago|reply
Noisy and inefficient is a good description. Granted, it had to run off a regular 15A outlet so it was never going to be as powerful as the one in the attic. But it made sleeping possible by getting the temperature below 85F (30C).
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karimmaassen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gruez|5 years ago|reply
The content might be interesting, but it's way too long. The guy goes on way too many tangents and adds way too much filler. You probably can boil the whole video down to a few bullet points, yet it's 16 minutes long.
[+] [-] starpilot|5 years ago|reply
> Seriously, either we need to get more awareness of how dumb single-hose portable A/C units are, or we need to just use window units whenever possible. While I know that there are times a portable unit is the only option (remember, I’m in that boat), it seems that only very high capacity, premium machines have the facility to use two hoses. Which is frankly stupid but then again that’s what I’m trying to tell you now.
Yes, you "shouldn't like them," unless it's you're only option, like in his case.
[+] [-] refurb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaggederest|5 years ago|reply
Anyone else know of other companies in this vein?
[+] [-] Spooky23|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leoedin|5 years ago|reply
The problems identified in the article are such low hanging fruit. Everywhere you look in residential housing there's huge efficieny gains to be made, but very little effort is going in to making them.
I'd love to find ways we can use technology to make housing more efficient. We need to - it's such a crucial pillar in dealing with climate change, and the vast majority of housing is so comically inefficient. The single tube air conditioners mentioned in the article are just the icing on the cake of all these massive energy wastes we accept because they're marginally more convenient. Does anyone know how to fix this?
[+] [-] esaym|5 years ago|reply
There's honestly a lot happening and changing. Obviously you won't see it by buying "HVAC" junk from a box store. What this person should have done is paid an actual HVAC tech to install a ductless mini-split [0]. It would have been a heck of a lot more efficient. He states his one unit is drawing 10 amps (110 volt I assume). Whereas my american standard 4 ton (48,000 btu) unit draws 10 amps as well (240 volt) and cools a 2200 square ft house in 100+ degree texas weather with an electric bill usually not higher than $120 per month (1200 - 1400 kwh or so).
By comparison, at my old house (which was half the size, 1100 sq ft) with a much older 12 Seer unit, my electric bill was regularly over $200. I measured that unit at drawing 18 amps (at 240 volt) and it was only a 3 ton 36,000 btu out door unit. The latest and greatest 21/22 seer units are even more efficient than my current one mentioned above (which is probably only 17 seer).
[0]: https://www.americanstandardair.com/products/heating-and-coo...
[+] [-] tgsovlerkhgsel|5 years ago|reply
I'm using one of those portable units because I live in a rented apartment. There is nothing convenient about it compared to a much more efficient real (split) AC, but I have no other options.
Even if the landlord was OK with allowing it, "green" laws intentionally make it incredibly tedious and expensive to get the permits to install an AC, so people swarm to the option they can get without paperwork.
[+] [-] maxerickson|5 years ago|reply
Builders spend money on things that make them profit and home buyers don't particularly evaluate efficiency.
After that you figure out how to spend public money on lower efficiency structures. Fraught, but spend money where it's likely to pay off and it probably works out okay.
[+] [-] noipv4|5 years ago|reply
Also who in their right minds in Europe decided to rate single hose AC at A+, or A efficiency levels; the same as a good split AC? Single hose portables should all start with an F to educate a potential customer as to how dumb this device design is.
https://www.galaxus.ch/en/s2/producttype/air-conditioners-28...
[+] [-] Bombthecat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AshamedCaptain|5 years ago|reply
I keep it that I can find no difference between operating in with one or two hoses myself https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24025482 .
[+] [-] lucb1e|5 years ago|reply
Non-summary version:
In the office, the sun bakes the roof to make our rooms a good bit hotter than outside, open windows or no. I was there for my interview on one of the hotter days that year and decided right then and there that either the company was going to buy an AC or I was. It ended up being the company, but I was fairly insistent about needing one so the money was kind of spent for me. If it had been my money, I'd have considered it a sunk cost and good lesson.
It took about one day of using the device for me to start to wonder about its working principles. I mean, I roughly knew: I own a fridge after all. One side gets hot and you cool it with air that is then blown outside; the other side is cold and you use it to cool air that is then blown into the room. But I hadn't really thought about it until after we owned one:
How can this thing have only one hose? What is the air that it blows out replaced by?
I asked that question out loud in the office and, yeah, given that it only blows hot air out, it must be creating negative pressure in the room and basically sucking that hot outside air back into the room. It's nonsensical. I even sketched out for a friend how it should work instead because they didn't get my issue. Turns out I reinvented the dual host system (which I never heard of until today).
To make matters worse, the ground floor apartment I moved into at the same time as starting to work there is amazing: it remains 22-24°C during the summer, also after 2 weeks of 35+°C outside (thick walls and shaded from the sun; no air conditioning involved at all). I didn't know that was possible.
If I had known that it would be fine to work from home for a few weeks per year and that my apartment would be super cool (literally and figuratively), I would never have insisted on some kind of air conditioning to try and counteract 20kW of sunlight[1] hitting the office windows and roof. I could have saved a ton of power/CO2 and quite a bit of money. To make matters worse, we didn't use to be under the roof, we used to have only morning sun through the windows. It was only slightly cooler than the new place, but this unit could actually manage to cool the room down.
But now we've chosen this course and I feel too guilty to say that we should just consider it a sunk cost, I'm not going to use it, it's so loud I can hardly concentrate, and I'll just work elsewhere during the hottest weeks. Can't do it. Recently, one of our smaller windows was replaced with some insulated plates with a hole cut out exactly for the AC hose in an attempt to make it work better. I think it does work better because it's less leaky than the flexible thing we had before to put in the window crack, but it's still a huge waste and we keep sinking money into this shitty "solution".
I don't even get it. Like, how hard is it to put a horizontal piece of foam in the hose and have the dual hose system in one hose? Make sure the hot side is on top and put fins at the end of the top half to make the hot air be blown upwards. May not be as efficient as having them be in separate hoses, but wouldn't that be a lot better? It's also not as if you'd be putting cold air next to hot air: it's about the already-hot outside air that would be running alongside the slightly hotter waste-heat air.
[1] https://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/ManicaPiputbundit.shtml 1.4kW/m² multiplied by an estimate of window and roof surface area of the single room that the AC is in.
[+] [-] dencodev|5 years ago|reply
Essentially what I'm aiming for is this: https://www.cruisencomfortusa.com/hd-series
which is a perfect product, except that it costs $4000 and still uses 20% more power than some of the smallest window units. It's ridiculous that the major difference between this $4000 unit and a $150 window AC is that the $4k version has a rubber hose connecting the compressor to the condenser coils instead of the typical thin copper pipe. I am sure there are other differences - it uses better components that are more suited to a moving vehicle with shocks and vibrations, has a strong compressor to deal with the longer hose length, and is already adapted to run off of 12V. But a $3850 price difference is ridiculous.
As the fellow on Youtube has shown (it's been in his camper van for years without a problem) there's really no reason the components from a $150 window unit won't work.
Whenever I finally do a camper van build I'm going to find an HVAC tech who can help me with a couple steps (mostly removing and then re-adding refrigerant) and convert the copper pipes to PTFE lined stainless braided hoses attached to SAE fittings. It may not work, and I've heard finding an HVAC tech to work on weird projects is very difficult, but I want to give it a try.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXgHIrFqm9o
[+] [-] coderintherye|5 years ago|reply
That said, refrigerant removal and reinsertion is regulated now and it's somewhat of a pain to do properly even with the right equipment.
[+] [-] elliekelly|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahfizz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yencabulator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moreati|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wiremaus|5 years ago|reply
Up front cost is higher, but the efficiency gains are huge, and they can cool/heat much faster.
[+] [-] peteretep|5 years ago|reply
The only place in this wide world I’ve seen anything other than split units is North America, so “Euro style” seems an odd description.
[+] [-] digianarchist|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neals|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] starpilot|5 years ago|reply
The insulated hose is something I'm exploring myself. There's insulated ducting like this: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Speedi-Products-6-in-x-12-ft-Ins... but it looks terrible. I'm kind of worried about having fiberglass being in my living space like that, the PPE is significant https://homeguides.sfgate.com/safe-ways-handle-fiberglass-in... and I'm pretty sure my cats would shred it up. I'm leaning toward adding reflectix sleeves with gaps so that the hose is flexible.
[+] [-] Vendan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BeetleB|5 years ago|reply
Window air conditioners work great, but if you can't have that, consider an evaporative cooler if you can get one at a decent price. Do make sure you get one with a decent air flow as well as a decent sized tank (e.g. one where you can run it all night without the water running out in the middle).
Probably won't work well in humid Midwest or South/East.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|5 years ago|reply
It got so boring when we rebuilt with proper falso floors ceilings and real racks.
[+] [-] arkanciscan|5 years ago|reply
However, the more I use the thing the more I realize that there's nothing wrong with it. Since the rest of the house isn't air conditioned there are open windows and fans throughout. Air is more likely to be drawn in from the rest of the house than through the cracks to the outdoors. Might be an issue in a sealed studio apt, but in our leaky shoebox of a ranch style home, it's hardly the biggest inefficiency.
[+] [-] Rebelgecko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajb|5 years ago|reply
One thing I've long wanted to try with mine is use 'heating mode' as a quieter version of cooling mode. They work the same - the unit just runs backwards, with the cold air coming out of the tube instead of the vents - so in theory you can cool your bedroom without having the noisy aircon in the same room. But the thermostat doesn't work properly in this case, because it thinks it's trying to raise the temperature of whatever room you put it in, not cool the other end of the tube, so for this to work properly you need to hack the control board.
[+] [-] mehrdadn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] starpilot|5 years ago|reply
Interestingly, in their tests, they didn't find dual-hose models to work much better than single-hose, unless it's extremely hot.
[+] [-] phendrenad2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dehrmann|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chx|5 years ago|reply
> The usual "smart" stuff that Nest provides
Reminder: https://michaelblume.tumblr.com/post/169525456166/tech-enthu...
> Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
> Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
> Security technicians: takes a deep swig of whiskey I wish I had been born in the neolithic.
[+] [-] saboot|5 years ago|reply
I did find a big improvement in getting duct insulation and wrapping the exhaust hose in that. For the window portion, I cut out an insulating foam board to mount the hoses, and taped the outside edge with reflecting tape. It's keeping my large bedroom around 76, unless it gets above 95 and will start creeping to low 80s.
[+] [-] dirtyid|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NELPBxrgsE
Wonder why there's no "n" designs for obstructive light. Regardless, there's no reason for portable AC, even duo hose ones due to length limitations on hose before inefficiencies. More effort into easy to install window / split units please.
[+] [-] 082349872349872|5 years ago|reply
(In my area, the herds would move between valley floor, mid-mountain, and alps. Most people would move between valley floor and mid-mountain. Peasant banking started here when everyone sent their cows up to the same alp, and the resulting cheese had to be divvied up between the owners and the alp crew.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumance
[+] [-] TwoBit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gpm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p1mrx|5 years ago|reply
In theory, you could build an insulated box with a mini-split or window/wall unit, but they're probably all optimized for cooling a large space, not freezing a small space.
Tech Ingredients made a DIY fridge (and a freezer in later videos) using peltier coolers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWUhwmmZa7A
[+] [-] hinkley|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bserge|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danbr|5 years ago|reply