Portable Air What?
This weekend I was shopping at Walmart with my youngest daughter (freshly graduated doctor of philosophy in animal genetics) and I walked by a display of one of those ‘car battery sized’ personal air coolers. To Walmart’s credit, the price for this little piece of plastic crap was as low as I’ve seen.
If you go on line, you will find a small handful of companies that are marketing the living crap out of these small evaporative coolers. The common element is that they refer to them as ‘AC’ units, avoiding the use of the word ‘conditioner’. They also make marvelous and near-miraculous claims for these units.
From a site promoting ChillWell AC Units:
Traditional AC units go for $300-800+, so you would expect the ChillWell Portable AC to be at least this…
But what if I told you that the ChillWell Portable AC retails for 178$, this is way below your expectations right! (Holy crap! Really? Just $178? How many can I get at this price?)
HOWEVER, do you know what’s better than paying the already good full 178$ price? (Typo left in place)
Their 55% promotional discount, where you can order yours for just 89$! (Typo left in place. At least they’re consistent.)
I guestimate this little plastic turd costs far less than $10 to manufacture!
Another site regales you with a story of how a young genius was forced to invent their portable cooler when his university declined to fix their broken AC system. They went on to say how his invention cooled ‘a classroom’ from 95°F to 65°F in two minutes! They also referred to a ‘400 square foot room’. Taking that as the above-referenced classroom, that’s 3,200 cubic feet, assuming an 8′ ceiling. This poor little naïve student was expelled three days later!
How many BTUs are needed to cool a 3,200 cubic foot room from 95°F to 65°F in two minutes? We take the cubic feet and multiply by the degree F temperature change, and then multiply by 0.133 to get BTUs per hour. But we’re talking about achieving this cooling in two minutes, so we multiply by 30. This gives us 383,000 BTUs, or about 32 tons!
What does a 32 ton AC unit look like? The unit below is 93″ x 48″ x 96″! The ChillWell that claims equivalent performance is indicated by the arrow.
Do you see the problem here? To say that one of these things is ‘overrated’ is like stating that Russia made a minor incursion into Ukraine and is feeling just a bit silly about it!
In an interesting sleight of hand, the printed advertisements use ‘AC’, but never the word ‘conditioning’. What, then, is ‘AC’? Why it’s ‘air cooling’, of course. What’s even more fully is that in their online ads they fade out the last part of the words ‘conditioning’ or ‘condition er’, thus avoiding the mortal sin of referring to these little plastic pieces of shite as ‘air conditioners’.
Recognizing that these little turdletts are small evaporative coolers, take a look at this chart from a manufacturer of such units that are industrial sized (Been to Home Depot on a hot day? They use evap cooling.) You’ll see that the temperature of air supplied by an evaporative cooler depends on the intake (room) air and the relative humidity of the intake air. The red highlight shows my average relative humidity in July and August, and that on a 100°F day I could expect my evaporative cooler to output air at 85°F at best. Let’s say I have a monster evaporative cooler (or 1,000 ChillWells); how cool can I get my room under these conditions? 85°F at best!
Still Fancy an Evaporative Cooler?
Check online for larger, room-sized coolers. They provide much more bang for the buck than one of these little pieces of crap. You might want to consider stepping up in price a bit and looking at portable in-room air conditioners. These are air conditioners in the true sense, and they exhaust the heated air via a flexible ‘dryer vent’ like tube through a window. We have a couple of them and have moved them to different rooms when needed.
The critique of this little crappy piece of cheap Chinese plastic wouldn’t be complete without a picture of some of the advertising.
Here’s a very attractive (and happy) lady waking refreshed after a restful night dozing peacefully under the cooling protection of her ChillWell unit.
The makers of ChillWell and similar units are simply greedy, immoral bastards concerned with nothing but separating the unwary buyer from their hard-earned money. There is no shortage of such companies, and they’re found in all areas of business and industry.
