This Smart Air Conditioner Is Helping Me Survive the Hellfire of Summer
It's hot. My paper-thin skinny jeans from the Uniqlo discount rack are sealed to my thighs. My feet are on fire and I drank too much rum. Waiting in the suffocating exhaust fumes of a subway stop, I'm dreading the long ride from New York City to my apartment in Brooklyn. Not only is there the chance that the weekend train will be endlessly delayed, but it could be crowded, stinky, or worse—un-air conditioned.
I'm dying to get back home. Not because I hate being around people in the summer, but because I've just pulled out my phone and activated my air conditioner from several miles away. And I know, no matter how awful the journey back might be, when I walk into my tiny little apartment, it's going to be cold as ice.
LG's new line of Dual Inverter Smart Air Conditioners are quiet, energy-efficient, and Wi-Fi-enabled. They use a proprietary dual inverter compressor that ramps up and down, rather than turning off and on like a traditional air conditioner. I'm not exactly sure what this means. But, whatever's going on inside the 9,500 BTU window unit that I'm using, it's quiet as hell, and chills my apartment like a dream. According to LG, the Dual Inverter line cools down the room more efficiently than the old-school units you may have had rattling in the window of your shitty off-campus college housing. In fact, the lineup is so efficient that it won LG its first Energy Star Emerging Technology Award in 2018.
If you have the dough, choosing an environmentally conscious appliance should be a no-brainer. One way to actually help save our rapidly deteriorating Earth is to throw your dollars toward greener machines. But if you're going to drop a few hundred bucks on a modern air conditioner—and I never thought I'd be one to say this—you should really consider something "smart." I picked up some smart outlets earlier in the spring to see what this new wave of technology is all about. No one wants a talking microwave that will relish in the embarrassment of your 2 a.m. commando hot pocket routine. But, lots of smart tech is simple and no-nonsense. I hooked up a bunch of lights around my place to my five smart outlets, connected them all to my phone through an app, and now I feel like I live in the Batcave. There's simple joy in saying "lights off" to my phone before going to sleep.
And though it seemed complicated at first to add the Dual Inverter air conditioner to my smart tech arsenal, the LG Smart ThinQ app walked me through a fairly painless process of connecting it to the cloud, giving me access to the full functionality of the unit, wherever, whenever—as long as I have service. If you're on an Android device, you can speak to the app via Google Assistant. The unit also connects to Amazon's Alexa service. And I take full advantage of this functionality. Once you have something in your home that you can control from your bed, you better believe you're going to make use of it. Why get up? Not supporting Siri voice controls is really the only negative thing I can say about the appliance.
The 9,500 BTU Dual Inverter also has a sleep timer, remote control, auto-restart (if power failure occurs), auto-evaporation (it dries down automatically when the power is turned off), and multiple fan speeds, all of which can be operated from the app. If, like me, you've lived with deafening units right next to your ear for the past few decades of your life, a quiet air conditioner like this unit is really a phenomenon to behold. I was under the impression that there was just no such thing as a quiet window air conditioner. I guess I was wrong.
To survive this scorching hot Earth, you may want to pick one up sooner rather than later. In fact, I'm turning mine on right now.
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