Ventless Air Conditioner

What exactly is a portable, ventless air conditioner? And what are the advantages of using one when compared to a regular AC with a vent or exhaust hose that needs to be connected to a window vent to get rid of the hot air.

The short answer is that there is no such thing as a portable AC than doesn't need to have its hot air vented to the outside. All AC's produce hot air and that hot air must be gotten rid of if you want the room you're standing in to get cool.

The point is, if you just leave a portable AC to run without its hose connected up to a window or other external vent aperture, it will just pump out the hot air into the room its standing in as well as trying to cool it down. The result is a net heating up of the room, because those things actually put out more "hot air" than "cold air" under normal running conditions.

Evaporative Cooler

If you read the home page for this mini-site, you probably already figured out that the kind of device I'm describing here is an evaporative or swamp cooler and not an AC. It's a confusing thing as the two very different types of coolers look very much alike especially when you don't know much about them!

This is what confuses a lot of people who buy a swamp cooler thinking they'll have a machine that will output as much as an AC even in their humid part of the country. The reality then hits them that this thing doesn't work and they send it back!

What really happened is they didn't know swamp coolers won't work too well in humid conditions. Or they really thought they were getting an air conditioner and now a swamp cooler. Result is the same.

The manufacturer gets a return and probably a bad review from a disgruntled customer who were just ignorant of what they were buying. The best solution is to make sure people are educated about what swamp coolers are and why they don't work in humid conditions!

However, for anyone living in a dry atmosphere, typically the south western states and desert areas like Colorado or Nevada, for example, an evaporative cooler is the perfect cost saving ecologically friendly cooling solution that DOES work in those arid conditions!

Making Cooler Air

Some might say it is not so fortunate to live in a very dry atmosphere unless you are specifically referring to running a swamp cooler. In that case, you should consider yourself fortunate enough to live in an area with really dry air, because you will generally get the best performance from your swamp cooler.

However, for most people this is not always the case and you need to factor in at least some measure of humidity to the equation. In that case, you will be looking for ways to get the coldest air from the device as you can.

The best way to maximize a swamp cooler's performance is to keep the air inside as dry as you can by circulating it with dryer air from outside. Do that by simply cracking open a window and also a door to create enough of a cross-draft to keep the indoor air circulated.

That has the effect of carrying the air that has been moistened by the cooler (in its normal operation of evaporating water to produce cold air) out of the building to maintain a kind of atmospheric status quo.

To accentuate this effect, it is also a good idea to position the cooler near to the open window to get more of the dry air coming in from outside.

Note: Air conditioner owners may be surprised at this advice, as it is normal to ensure all windows and doors are kept closed to keep the hot outside air out so as not to overtax the air conditioning equipment. This is not the case for swamp coolers. The opposite is true, in fact. A slightly open window will not heat up the room because the swamp cooler will be immediately chilling the hot dry air that comes in, so there is no impact to temperature with this type of cooling device.

Thinking Economy

Swamp coolers are probably the most economical cooling devices that make a real difference to the temperature in a room as long as they air is already fairly dry. I say dry, meaning it has very little evaporated moisture already in it, as would be the case in humid conditions.

These portable appliances are perfect compact coolers that cost very little to run because they use so little electricity when compared to true air conditioners. I'm talking a typical rating of around 100-200 watts for a swamp cooler, compared to around 2,000 watts for a comparable size AC. That's a huge saving in dollar terms when you're only using one tenth or less the amount of energy to run it!

The Best Article About Ventless AC

If you want to read what I consider to be one of the best articles on ventless air conditioners, take a look at this one:

https://airconergy.com/air-conditioning/ventless-portable-air-conditioner.php

It doesn't just talk about what they are and how they work, it actually explores what they are not and why so many people get confused with the ads they see for these supposedly magical low power coolers that are in fact not air conditioners at all!


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