BJs Wholesale Members: Midea Duo 12000-BTU Inverter Portable Air Conditioner

1 Portable AC units are phenomenally easier to install in a window. Window AC units can be a bitch to install and take down, especially for just one person. If the portable AC unit is already in the room and positioned in front of the window, pretty much anyone, elderly or even teens can install or take down a portable AC.
2 they don't require you to remove a window screen(so less chance of bugs getting in)
3. Less chance potentially damage the storm window frame, sill, casement or the window itself.
4.You don't need to have an exterior support on the outside of the window to hold up the weight of the window AC.
5. Portable ACs are far more secure for your home because you can easily take the entire window mounting kit out of your window and then lock the window at any time, in just a few seconds. Thieves love, I mean looove window AC units because they can just wait until they see the homeowner leave and then go up and push the AC unit into the interior of the house and have a completely clear and open window to access your home. I've heard of situations where someone has just gone up to a window AC unit, lifted the window up and pulled it right out of the window and ran with the entire air conditioner, broken cord and all. 😅
6. They don't make your house look like crap
7. They usually have wheels and handles, so you can actually move them around your house if you need to, or relocate and install into another room in just a minute or two. That's where the portable part comes in.

The downsides are
1. that they can be loud,(although inverter units like this are usually much quieter because they self-regulate the speed of the compressor, so they often don't need to run at 100% like many AC units do all the time. This is why inverter AC units are more efficient)
2. They are less efficient overall than window AC units, this is largely because they have much greater heat emission through convection, conduction and even infrared from the portable AC unit that is inside your house, so all that heat gets dissipated into the interior of your home. The AC pulls that heat out when it cools the air, but it reduces the efficiency. With a window AC unit almost the entirety of the unit is out side, so the majority of that heat is dissipated outdoors rather than in your home.
3. they may need to have their water tank drained regularly in very humid locations,
4. take up floor space,
5. Usually cost more than a window unit for the same btu

just like window units, they have their own electrical requirements. On that last item, you have to consider any air conditioning unit's electrical draw in the same way that you would a space heater. You need to make sure that your wiring is up to the job and that you don't overload the total amperage / power draw for the entire circuit in the room. You can't (physically can, but REALLY shouldn't) use an extension cord on an air conditioner unit. You will want to electrically isolate any electronics that are plugged into the same circuit to prevent damage from the voltage spikes(the milliseconds where the voltage in the circuit is balancing and causing what most people are familiar with as slight "brownouts" because of how it made incandescent bulbs temporarily dim) when the air conditioner turns on and off. A good UPS with built-in voltage regulation should be able to protect your electronics. At the very least get a solid state voltage regulator. Otherwise it is just a matter of time until the cumulative damage eventually breaks your electronics. 😕


If you just need temporary cooling and want to be able to move the air conditioner around, a dual hose/hose-in-hose portable like this is the way to go. If you have central air and it still isn't getting the job done, before buying any AC unit, you should contact a professional heating and cooling company and have them come and take a look at your furnace and air conditioning unit. A lot of times low performance can be fixed by routine maintenance, finding and sealing leaks in the air ducts, or putting an in-line blower into an air vent to increase air pressure and volume to distant rooms to get the air where it needs to be.

You might also want to look at weatherizing your home to reduce leaks and gaps that are letting in hot humid/cold air. Improving Insulation is an investment that almost always sees a dramatic return in just a few years. If you improve the insulation in your home and reduce your electrical and heating bills you can recoup the cost of the insulation in just a couple years; it pays for itself in lower bills. After that, everything you save is just money that stays in your pocket. That really is the best deal, not needing to spend your money in the first place.

Good luck! 👍

Yes, there are several good UPS units out there that are available that would suit your needs and even give you some additional protection.

My current favorite would be the CyberPower Model CST1500S (url below)
It has a lot of good features in addition to the UPS with event detection and isolation. surge suppression, automatic voltage regulation, data port protection for coax (cable) and RJ45(computer networking cables), USB to PC connectivity to shut down your PC automatically, a decent battery and even a couple handy USB ports on front so that you could just use to charge a phone if that's all you needed. Those are all great features, and should be considered pretty much standard at this point, but the thing that really puts this one above a lot of the other models is the fact that the built-in dc to AC inverter, the part that provides electricity when the power goes out, produces a true sine wave form AC. This means that the electricity provided when you have no incoming utility power is almost exactly the same quality as utility power.

(Tldr; a true sine wave inverter makes cleaner power that works with everything, and that is good.)

This is important if you have any delicate or precision electronics that are sensitive to irregular power sources. I won't get into all that in detail, but one of the most common issues were that causes a problem is with devices that cannot detect or process power from an inverter that has a square sine or even a step stimulated sine wave. Laptops are a great example of that, there are many laptop chargers that will not function on a square sine wave power. Usually people find that out when they're trying to charge a laptop from a power inverter in their car. In short, some devices see square/stepped sine wave generator power as 'dirty' and will not work.


Costco had it on sale for $149 about 2 months ago. I bought two of them and wish I had bought more to swap out my 8 older APC brand UPC units for all of the "around the house" electronic areas.

http://www.costco.com/cyberpower-...27623.html

Costco seems to have good sales on UPS's every couple months, you can search here on sd for "Costco ups" to see some of the sales. If you ever have a choice between UPS' at the same price or even a little bit more, get a full sine wave generated UPS.


💡That's all great, but if you don't have the cash and aren't willing / able to wait for a sale, there are also some alternatives.

The first thing I'd recommend that you do is to take a look and see if all the outlets in your specific room are on the same circuit. The easiest way to check that is to turn off all of your other equipment, turn off the breaker to the room and use an non contact electrical voltage detector that you can put up next to an outlet to see whether it is on or not. You can get them at any hardware store or online for under $10. If the breaker is off but not all of the outlets are dead, that means you have more than one circuit feeding into the room, so no problem, just plug your electronics into the other circuit that isn't shared with the outlet you're going to be plugging the A/C into. If you don't have a voltage detector, you can still easily check if you plug a lamp or a fan or something that is obviously visually 'on' into each outlet, turn off the breaker and then see if anything is still on afterwards. Worth a shot.

Another thing you could do if you really had to is to run an extension cord in from another room that is on another circuit and power your electronics through that. You would have a significantly reduced risk of damage from a brownout event from the A/C turning on and off. It's not ideal because you don't want to have an extension cord going down a hallway or underneath the door, but it's something you could do right away to give your electronics a degree of isolation. You don't want to run a portable AC or heater on an extension cord, ever.

IMO you should have a good UPS or two to protect your equipment regardless because a power bump from the Air conditioner isn't by far the only thing that can cause electrical damage to your gear. It sounds like you've got a few thousand dollars worth of electronics there, and imo $150 is a very very low price to provide not only protection but also additional utility in eventuality of power issues.

One of the simplest and smartest things you can do, even if you have a UPS, great house wiring, whole house and point of use surge suppressors, voltage regulators, af+gfci breakers all backed up to a full isolation transformers (I know, that's a lot of electrician nerd talk) is to simply unplug something when you aren't using it. 🤔 Yeah, really. Seems pretty straightforward, right? But most people never really think about it. Nobody wants to actually plug and unplug stuff, so to make life a lot easier you're probably going to want to get an individually switchable power strip, something like this

CRST 6 Outlet Heavy Duty Power Strips with Individual Switches, 15AMP/1875W Surge Protectors Metal Power Strip with Circuit Breaker(1200 J), 6 FT Extension Cord 14AWG

smile.amazon.com/dp/B097JH3W3W/

Shop around; you can find similar individually switched power strips with or without surge suppression for as low as $8-9 bucks. Flip a switch and your downline electronics are isolated from your home wiring, so lightning, power bumps, brownouts, and whatever else won't ever be able to reach your device to even potentially cause damage. You will also be able to get rid of all vampire power drain on any of those devices, and that by itself should pay for the power strip over the years.

Good luck. 👍