The Best Portable Air Conditioners for Cooling Your Home

A portable air conditioner makes it easy to cool down each room inside of your home. So long as you can create a connection between this appliance and outdoor air, you’ve got it made. Simply wheel the portable a/c where you need it most. Next, attach the hose and window bracket kit that comes with it to blend interior and exterior air. Plug in the unit, turn it on, and start enjoying a cool and dry living area. Even better, you don't need a second person to help you install a portable air conditioner, like you often do with window units. In our testing, we found it takes just about ten minutes to go from unboxing one to cooling a space.

Below is a quick list of some of the best portable air conditioners. Scroll down to read buying advice followed by more in-depth reviews.

The Best Portable Air Conditioners

How Portable Air Conditioners Work

Portable air conditioners take in air that’s hot, stale, and humid, and blow it over a cold metal coil. Inside the coil is refrigerant gas that’s at a much lower temperature than the room’s air. The temperature of the air drops as it passes over the cold coil. This cold air enters the room and begins to mix with the hot air in the room, lowering its temperature. Meanwhile, the appliance draws in moisture vapor suspended in the room’s air. There, it comes into contact with the cold coil surface. The vapor in the air condenses on the coil, drips off, and collects inside of a pan for easy dumping.

As for the cold refrigerant gas, it gets sucked back to a compressor, where it changes phase, converting from a gas to a liquid. At this point, all its heat energy is concentrated in a small area. A fan blows over this hot coil, and the heat energy is released outside.

Known as condensate, the water that was condensed out of the air may be disposed of in any number of ways. You can remove the pan and dump it. Or the air conditioner itself may sling the moisture against the hot part of the coil where it will be converted back to vapor and expelled in the exhaust. In the rare instances where the portable air conditioner is located near a floor drain, the condensate can be simply run through a tube to the drain. In other cases, the tube leading from the air conditioner’s drain pan can lead to a condensate pump that will pump the liquid water to the outside or to a drain elsewhere in the building.

Some portable air conditioners have one hose while others have two. One-hose appliances take in cooled room air and use it to cool the extremely hot condenser coil. They blow the heated air outside. Two-hose models are slightly more complex and may be more expensive than some single-hose models. One hose takes in outdoor air and uses it to cool the hot condenser coil and then discharges the heated air through the second hose. Some of these dual-hose appliances are configured as a hose within a hose so that only one hose is visible.

It's logical to ask whether a single hose appliance is better than a dual-hose model or vice versa. There's no simple answer to that. Single-hose models create a slight pressure drop inside the house, since they are exhausting indoor air in the process of cooling the condenser. This negative pressure causes the living space to draw increased air from the outdoors in order to maintain a pressure equilibrium.

To solve the pressure drop problem, manufacturers invented the dual-hose design, which uses warm outdoor air to reduce the temperature of the condenser. The appliance does not eject indoor air, thus the air pressure inside the dwelling remains more consistent. That's not a perfect solution, however, since now you have two lare, warm hoses in the living space that you are trying to cool.

How We Test

We place each portable air conditioner inside of the same room made up of tall windows that take in a strong amount of sun. We then set the temperature on each air conditioner to 68 degrees and the fan speed to maximum, aiming the appliance at a target 8 feet away. Then we measure the temperature at four locations on the target using an infrared thermometer and thermocouples. We also check the appliance’s outlet temperature (it should be consistent and a lot hotter than what the air conditioner is putting into the room). We run the appliances on a hard surface that amplifies rattles and squeaks.

To analyze the cooling value of these appliances, we divide their cooling BTU by their cost. A higher number is better in that it indicates you get more cooling BTUs for your dollar. We tested the LG LP1419IVSM and Black & Decker BPACT14H and included several others that we think are worth investigating based on their attractive features or because the appliance earned high marks from our colleague publication Good Housekeeping and its staff of engineers.