Portable Air Conditioners: Venting And Humidity

For those who want the convenience of climate control in any room of their house, depending on which one they are using at the moment, but do not have enough resources for a central air system (or even a mini split air conditioner system), portable air conditioners offer a noisy but effective solution. These small, lightweight ac units can be easily shifted from room to room as the day advances and you go from cooking in the kitchen, to watching television or reading email in the living room, to relaxing in bed before sleep.

Unlike window units, portables sit on the floor, meaning that you do not have most of your view from one of the windows blocked. You also do not need to wrestle the ponderous cubic weight of one of these devices up onto the windowsill. Since portables weigh less than window units, they are also quicker and easier to move from room to room.

Venting hot air from a portable air conditioner
Although a good portable ac unit can easily cool down an average-sized room (as long as the windows and doors are kept shut to exclude hot air flow from outside the space), it cannot destroy the heat that it processes out of the air, just shunt it to a new place. For this reason, it is necessary to vent hot air outside the room that is being cooled, or the air conditioner will not work.

Portables come with a flexible plastic hose, usually around five to six feet long and with a 4 or 5 inch diameter. This vent hose is designed to pipe the heat that the conditioner has extracted from the room air to an external vent of some kind.

Most people use the included window insert to vent the heat to the outdoors. This insert rests on the windowsill and is usually held in place by a sash window. The window must slide open horizontally or vertically in order to be used with a portable air conditioner's vent insert - one which opens outwards cannot hold it in place. The vent tube can also be run to a hole in the wall. Some people even vent the heat to other rooms of the house which do not need to be kept cool.

Humidity and portable air conditioners
The special construction of a portable air conditioner - and its presence within the room itself, rather than on the boundary between the interior and exterior - means that it cannot vent humidity processed out of the air with the same ease as a window unit or central air. Instead, most models collect humidity in an internal container as it condenses out of the air.

This container needs to be periodically emptied, either by gravity drainage along an attached tube or by removing the entire container assembly and dumping it manually into the sink. If the container is allowed to fill, the portable will switch off automatically to prevent damage to itself. Some more sophisticated models vaporize the water and seek to expel it in the hot air exhaust, but this is rather less efficient. However, these are small prices to pay for the convenience of a cheap, portable air conditioner that can bring cool air wherever you need it at the moment.