Customer Reviews

11-500 Btu Portable Air Conditioner

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I live in an apartment with casement windows and therefore can only use portable style air conditioners. My first was a DeLonghi. It was extremely expensive, EXTREMELY heavy(a swelte 108 lbs.), and although it was 13000 btus it was unable to effectlively cool my approximately 500 sq. ft. space. In addition, it required you fill a tank with water which it used as a cooling agent to work at maximum capacity. The tank would empty on humid days within 2 hours and require a refill to work again. Obviously, if you wanted to keep the setting high overnight as you slept the unit did not work well. It broke last summer, and although I live in a major city, the nearest authorized service place was an hour away by car. After one repair, and a second breakdown right after, I had had enough. The replacement? This unit. Although it is 11,500 btus, it has already done a better job cooling my apartment than the DeLonghi EVER did. The air blows COLD. Unlike that unit and many other larger portables, this unit requires no filling OR emptying of water, and so all you have to do is switch it on and walk away. It has an LCD display on the remote so you can custom set the temperature, settings and fan speed. It's a trim unit and much lighter than many. And although someone else reviewing this product criticised the swiveling vents (which go up and down), this is actually useful in cooling the whole room, not just one area. Sure, the majority of functions are on the remote, but the unit has a holster for it, and besides, how hard is it to keep track of a remote?? Highly recommended.

After reading reviews here and other online sites, I chose this Sharp portable AC over Soleus or Delonghi. I brought it home the first day of a 100 degree heat wave (in CA) and got it set up in 15 minutes. It is heavy so I required help to get it into and out of the car, but the crate was easy to unpack because once the plastic ties are removed, the top of the box slides off and you simply roll the unit off the box bottom. The casters roll easily even over the threshold, I had no problems positioning it where I wanted it. The unit looks very sleek and blends into the room.

Getting the window frame adapter installed took about 10 minutes. After that, it was simply snap on the hose on both ends, plug in and turn on! The store advised we wait 1-2 hours after transporting to start the unit, since tilting it could disturb the coolant.

Our little house is a cottage and very poorly insulated, single pane windows and probably just newspaper in the walls. With this unit running, our 500 square foot house dropped from 90 degrees to 75 degrees in a few hours on mega cool. The unit pumps out a lot of air when the fan is on high, and it is VERY quiet! You can hear swishing air, but the compresser is unbelievably quiet. Compared to our old in window AC we were not even sure if this thing was running at first (other than the fan).

We've had it going for 4 days now and it is keeping even our poorly-insulated house pleasantly cool with external temps above 95 degrees. We installed the unit on the sunny side of the house but since this unit exhausts hot air but pulls the intake air from your house it doesn't seem to affect performance if it is installed on the sunny side of the house. I also consider this a more efficient design, since the air inside the house will be cooler after some time running, so you are recycling the cooled air rather than drawing in hotter air from outside.

We plan to wrap the hose with insulation (sold for air ducts) to make the unit even more efficient. The hose is long enough that we have the unit about 3' to the right of our window and the hose reaches fine. If you needed to place it further away, you could easily extend the hose with a dryer exhaust hose sold at hardware stores. The hose rises straight up out the back of the unit so it can be pushed back right up to the wall.

The remote is easy to use.

Overall, this is an excellent if expensive unit, and quiet enough to leave running while we sleep.

Editing to add: We've had the unit about a month now and we're very pleased, it not only kept us cool during the extreme heat wave, but with all the forest fires burning in California this summer our air was very bad and my allergies were awful. We kept this unit running with the air cleaner even when it was not cooling and it kept our indoor air healthy and clean. My allergies from the smoke went away after running this for a couple of days. Now that the heat wave has passed we have used it as an air filter on windy days when my allergies cat up, and I suspect it will be very useful as a dehumidifier in our damp rainy winter season, too.

This unit is very quiet on cool and fan settings, the air filter makes a low whooshing noise which I actually like for sleeping.

Very quiet , cools well. -Unit could have controls on it in case remote is not handy however there is a power button on the unit.
The unit will remember the last mode set with the remote when the unit's power button is used.

Sharp, indeed.

This thing is elegantly designed chilling machine. The picture doesn't do it justice. Sleek. I have never seen a window unit that I would call "sleek".

I bought this for use in an almost 600sq ft apartment. After surviving my last apartment's window unit, I didn't expect much, but I figured it's portable so I could set it right next to my desk or my bed or maybe even bungy it to my belt and tow it around if I had to avoid another 98F degree day in my new non air conditioned apartment.

No drastic measures needed. None at all. I unboxed it and was up and running in about 25 minutes and put it right to the test at the hottest point of the day.

It dropped my ambient temperature from 87F to 77F in about 2 hours using the "MEGA COOL" setting which I thought was fairly impressive.

Over the last week, I've had to keep adjusting the temperature incrementally upward to keep from freezing.

I keep it set on about 77F and it is more than enough to keep my entire apartment cool with no need for directed air flow.

This baby gives you the option of a frigid air conditioner, it can dehumidify, it can even pump in fresh air if you live somewhere that still has fresh air.

I love this thing. I've had a lot of terrible window units and tepid nasty central air through filthy ducts and I would take this unit over any of them. I may adopt this as my official air conditioner and never stray.

You really have to look hard to find something to complain about this product as I see some people have done, but if you want cool filtered ionized fresh air this will do that trick and if Amazon doesn't have it in stock you can buy it from qualitymatters.com like I did for a great price w/ free shipping.

Did I mention I love this thing?

The unit cools well and it is quieter than some other portable units I have seen but it suffers from several design flaws that were not apparent before I bought the product.

First - there are no controls on the unit itself. Not even a power switch. Everything is controlled through the remote control. So even if you're sitting near the unit you still have to find the remote to make any changes. And if you lose the remote you can't even turn the unit on or off.

Second - the unit only has a few lights on the front and it can be difficult to tell which mode it is in. The remote shows the modes, but sometimes you hit a button on the remote and it does not register so the remote now thinks the unit is on fan mode while it is still on cool mode.

Third - the louvers that direct the airflow automatically oscillate up and down, not side to side, which makes no sense. Side to side adjustment is manual.

Fourth - you can set the louvers to point a specific direction, but it constant forgets the up and down part and points the airflow at the ceiling. Be prepared to reset this every time you change modes on the unit.

Quite quiet, cools well, good looking design. The louvers move well,
overall an excellent unit. My only suggestion would be to make the window
fitting parts a bit less flimsy. Nevermind all the complains about
controls on the unit, and so on -- it has just what it needs. An
overall excellent unit.

OK so I decided to unpack bulky box and install it this morning. It is heavy and big and the reviewer had me worried that it would be cumbersome to install. Imagine my surprise - I found it to be a breeze. The hardest part was getting it out of the box and down the hall into the office.
My office has 2 of everything - computers, printers, etc, and has a very large full sun facing Southern California window; so it has been unbearably hot for years.
I fidgeted getting a good seal in my large vertical sliding window but the moment I turned on the unit I was in heaven. I set up the timer to turn off in 12 hours and sat down to write this review. I can only report on setup and initial operation, both of which I found to be incredibly easy. The unit is quiet and blessedly cool - my office has never been this comfortable. I am cool as a cucumber and loving my new purchase.
10/14/09 Just wanted to comment that it is over a year later and the unit still works like a champ. This summer I rarely turned on my central air - when I am home I used this unit in my office - I was comfortable, my dog was comfortable and my energy bill was drastically reduced. Still a winner.

The air conditioner was very quiet and worked pretty good all season (July through early September in Seattle) and then suddenly a strong burnt electrical smell came out of the unit. I unplugged it immediately and readied the unit for return - as it was still on warranty. Before placing it in my car to return, I tipped it to drain the water out. Big design flaw! The plastic drain spigot is located at the bottom - just out of view if you are not on your hands and knees. Tip the unit slightly to drain and the weight breaks the drain spigot off! It did not look easy to fix! I was glad I discovered this after the unti had already burned up inside!

This unit is advertised as being very quiet, however they neglect to mention one thing: when it starts up and shuts down it's VERY LOUD. What's the point of having a unit run quietly when it makes an unacceptably loud noise every few minutes as the compressor kicks in? Yeah, once the compressor's running it's fairly quiet -- but it's loud enough to wake me up from across the room (and I am NOT a light sleeper).

Because I didn't want the hassle of returning it, I kept the unit, and it broke down after 2 months of moderate use.

So, yes, it cools as advertised - but who cares when it breaks down and is so loud in spurts?

And good luck trying to get service from Sharp...I am still waiting for service to get the damned thing fixed.

Don't buy this unit unless you want problems!

We too have casement windows so choices are limited. At first, we didn't quite know how to install for our particular casements but we figured it out but adapting an old screen. I have had this unit now for over 2 years and it still works great. Some reviewers have mentioned the lack of switches on the unit, but I haven't found that to be a problem, there is a place for the remote on the unit so, that's where we keep it. I also like the design of the unit. It looks good and is easy to move around and store until next season. Others have also mentioned it's quiet and others that it's not quiet. First, all air conditioners are noisy. You either have compressor noise or just the moving of air noise. I find this unit to be pretty quiet. Is it library quiet? Well, it is not, but it's pretty quiet when you compare it to other air conditioners. I don't have a problem sleeping with it on.

Until someone gets around to inventing a tiny, ductless, cheap and completely quiet air conditioner, I will be very happy with this model. In fact, we were so happy with the first one, we bought a second a year ago--for the third floor, and all is good--no problems--fairly quiet, efficient cool air. I should mention that there are several options for running the unit--you can run it as a fan--and as an exhaust fan, you can run just the dehumidifier--often useful for those really humid days, you can run the ionizer--which I think has something to do with purifying the air and of course as an air conditioner--with various fan speeds etc.

Good unit, I would definitely buy again.