It's much better than expected
I was hesitant to buy another cheap Chinese portable AC after my last experience. The last one would barely cool you down pointed directly at you with the door closed in a 10x10 room. This one is a world of difference in the same room. I plugged it in and turned it on and immediately felt like the room was much cooler. I am in a bedroom with the door open and the rest of the house is not cooled. I want the bedroom frigid, but usually the rest of the house doesn't matter. The thermometer in here says the room is 65 currently. That is with the door open. I had been running it a while quite content when I decided to play with the buttons and realized it was on low fan. Even on low, it was blowing cold air out through the hallway cooling the area in a direct path through the dining room and into the kitchen. It's not going to cool the whole place, but you can feel cool air blowing in a direct line for 20ft even running on low. It will drop the temp in the hallway a degree or two though when the sun isn't shining. On high, the air is cold enough I don't want it pointed directly at me. The high mode is definitely too noisy to be right next to it, but low works great. I appreciate how they packaged this unit. The AC was placed on a bottom base with the rest of the box slid down over the top and straps holding it all together. When I unboxed it, I just had to pull the top portion off, cut the cord away from packaging it was taped to, and tip the AC over enough to wiggle it off of the base piece. With back issues, it was still easy to do. The window kit with this unit is exponentially better than the last one I used. The pieces were easy to attach and stay on great, whereas a cheaper unit will have the hose coming undone repeatedly from both ends. The window piece is quite thin so it's a smaller area to worry about outside air being able to come back around and in. The edge pieces also fit back inside the window track so that there's not a lot of room for air to get in anywhere. I have a regular vertical sliding window that's about 34 inchces wide. The ad had a photo illustrating a width of 25.5 inches to 49.5 so I felt confident this would work for me. It is a bit misleading though. The sliding piece covered the edge of the outlet hole while the connector blocked it from being able to do so. I took a flathead screwdriver and popped that sliding piece out enough it slid over the edge of the duct connector about half an inch so that it would fit properly in my window. Another thing to appreciate is that it uses an evaporative cooling technique that apparently lessens the amount of drainage. Some of these units have to be drained on AC mode frequently and that is not acceptable. I have had it about a month and just had to empty the water tank for the first time. The noise on this model is great white noise which makes it easier to sleep, in my opinion, except when that high fan blower comes on and gets louder. I still haven't figured out what that is about, but it seems to do it when the temp gets colder rather than shutting off. The unit I received says Costway on it and the manual (model Costway FP10110US). The ad mentions the coolant being R410A while the manual mentions R32. Overall, I am ecstatic to find one that will work this well for just over $200. I couldn't use a window unit here and portables seem to be hit or miss. This one hasn't blown any breakers or had any problems so far. Read more
