expired Posted by omelette_du_fromage • May 21, 2022
May 21, 2022 7:02 PM
Item 1 of 1
expired Posted by omelette_du_fromage • May 21, 2022
May 21, 2022 7:02 PM
BJs Wholesale Members: Midea Duo 12000-BTU Inverter Portable Air Conditioner
+ S&H$450
$500
10% offBJs Wholesale
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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! 👍
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. 👍
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Heated floor under the ENTIRE home? Pre-2000.
USA = sucks.
I have a Midea u-shape in the living room and it's so quiet, Cant use it in the bedroom bc that window is above another resident and complex won't allow anything to potentially fall below due to liability. So picked up a Wynter Single hose unit and it's too damn loud for me to sleep comfy.
I have a Midea u-shape in the living room and it's so quiet, Cant use it in the bedroom bc that window is above another resident and complex won't allow anything to potentially fall below due to liability. So picked up a Wynter Single hose unit and it's too damn loud for me to sleep comfy.
The Midea is duo so very tempting, but I have no BJS near by so needs to be shipped and return would be a hassle if needed
I watched the video you linked and he brings up some good points in his explanation, that the SEER rating should be considered. But I'll add to that that not just the seer rating but the ASHRAE-128 Standard and DOE 2017 Standard ratings are FAR more useful and accurate to measuring the EFFECTIVE cooling and efficiency of a portable air conditioner. SEER values can be completely skewed and made meaningless just by something as simple as having a incorrectly sized air conditioner servicing a room that is too large or too small for its btu rating.
And I absolutely agree that the simple presence of a two hose configuration should not be the deciding factor between two specific portable AC units. If you have a dual hose portable air conditioner that is made with crap components, it will of course be inferior to a single hose portable air conditioner that's made with a high efficiency inverter compressor, high efficiency fan and all copper heat exchangers. (even with the substantial drop an effectiveness and efficiency that a single hose unit creates by pulling unconditioned error into the interior of your home.)
But all things being equal, the exact same compressor, heat exchangers, fans, put into a dual hose configuration will ALWAYS outperform the exact same components in a single hose configuration in any normal application. That's not a matter of opinion, it's proven fact.
Of course you don't want to buy a crappy portable air conditioner to start out with. If you buy a garbage product even if you save a few dollars up front you're going to end up with a garbage product. (Most of the single hose portable air conditioner units that are posted here on SD.)
I would recommend that you look for a portable air conditioner that
1. Is sized correctly for the area you need to cool
2. Uses a closed loop dual hose exhaust
3. Has an efficient inverter
4. Has a good but quiet fan, good air circulation and projection
5. Has smart features that do things like track humidity and allow you to turn it on and off with an app or on schedule.
These are all things you should be looking for when you buy a portable air conditioner, in that order of importance.
Hope that helps. 👍
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Heated floor under the ENTIRE home? Pre-2000.
USA = sucks.
If you have slider windows, I would pass. Sliders are an afterthought here. The "two in one" hose is designed in a horizontal orientation and their solution for sliders is fidgety. This is the same for other brands who use this design (Danby, Toshiba, etc).
This isn't my first portable. Others I have used were designed primarily with slider windows in mind so this was disappointing.
If I had spent five minutes looking at the manual instead of the price and reviews, I would have seen that.
I will keep it but will find some way to bond everything together or get a piece of plexiglass made that will allow me to use the hose without the adapter in my slider window.
If you have slider windows, I would pass. Sliders are an afterthought here. The "two in one" hose is designed in a horizontal orientation and their solution for sliders is fidgety. This is the same for other brands who use this design (Danby, Toshiba, etc).
This isn't my first portable. Others I have used were designed primarily with slider windows in mind so this was disappointing.
If I had spent five minutes looking at the manual instead of the price and reviews, I would have seen that.
I will keep it but will find some way to bond everything together or get a piece of plexiglass made that will allow me to use the hose without the adapter in my slider window.
Which other ones would you recommend for slider windows. Thanks
also hows the noise?
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Which other ones would you recommend for slider windows. Thanks
https://usermanual.wiki/m/f6f9ba2..._opti
Basically, you build an adapter by snapping three pieces together and then snap that onto the hose and the window panel. The snaps are not particularly secure and do not like having weight applied. If you decide to get it, I would put it all together and then put it in the window vs trying to snap it into the window panel when it is in place. Also, many other brands allow you build a very rigid window panel. This one uses plastic stops to extend the panel so it is not particularly rigid. You need to be more deliberate when you put it into your window.
All that said, this works very well. It is quiet and cools the room. This installation process just makes it hard to recommend for slider windows.
If you are ok with single hose, and don't need something today, Costco had an LG for $400 a few weeks ago.
https://slickdeals.net/f/15776902-lg-10k-btu-doe-sacc-dual-inverter-smart-portable-air-conditioner-model-lp1022fvsm-399-97?a
Maybe wait for that to come around again.