The 4 Best Portable Air Conditioners to Mitigate Summer Heat

When choosing a portable air conditioner, you have to look at a few things. The first is use case. You’ve already determined you need a portable unit as opposed to a window unit, but why is that? Are you trying to take it with you or is it meant for one room in particular? By answering these questions, you’ll figure out where your focus should be in regard to the following categories.

BTU: British Thermal Units (BTUs) are a measure of how much energy an AC is using—basically how powerful it is. On average, it must have 20 BTUs for each square foot of space a unit is cooling in order to work properly. You can multiply the amount of space you need by this number to roughly determine how powerful of an air conditioner you require. The current high end of portable units is 14,000 BTU, which many of these selections hit.

Decibel Level: A disadvantage of portable AC units is that they can often be loud. Like jet-engine-in-your-backyard loud. This is why noise level is something we paid careful attention to while choosing which portable units to recommend. The closer a decibel number is to zero, the closer it is to complete silence. While absolute zero is out of the question, we loved the LG portable air conditioner for its lower decibel levels, which clocked in at just under 50.

Mobility: The upside of a portable air conditioner is that it’s mobile. Unfortunately, many on the market are not. The conceit of air conditioning makes it difficult for one to work when it’s not hooked up to a window. If you need to move your AC from room to room on a daily basis, the hose-in-hose design of the Whynter and the Midea makes them easy to move. But if you need something truly portable, go with the EcoFlow Wave 2 and never look back.