Customer Reviews

Koldfront 8,000 BTU Ultra Compact Portable Air Conditioner

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Hello everyone!

Portable air conditioners work by taking the air from your room, cooling it, and blowing the hot air out through an exhaust hose attached to your window.

But blowing hot air to the outside creates negative pressure inside your room which, in turn, pulls in more hot air from the outside (the amount of air blown out is equal to the amount of air pulled in). It is kind of self defeating.

The portable air conditioner is able to cool your room as long as the air it exhausts is hotter than the hot air pulled in, then there is an overall cooling effect. But as the temperature outside increas, a small A/C unit may not have enough BTU to to cool the air enough to compensate the hot air being sucked in.

I made the mistake of using a traditional web based cooling calculator to estimate the amount of BTU's needed for a portable A/C. If I had read the web page more carefully I would have noticed that these BTU calculators are for window/wall mounted air conditioners. The major difference between a window A/C and a portable A/C is that the window unit has its heat exchange coils outside and does not create negative pressure in your room (in other words, the cold air in the room is not directly diluted by warm air being sucked in from the outside). Without the negative pressure, there is no hot air being pulled in, so the amount of BTUs needed to cool the room is much less. Of course, even with a window A/C, warm air still seeps into the room but at a lower rate.

I estimate that I would need at least 50% more BTU in a portable air conditioner than that shown in web based BTU calculator for my needs. So instead of the 8,000 BTU Koldfront unit, I should have gotten a 12,000 BTU portable air conditioner.

Note: some portables A/C have two hoses, one for the exhaust and one for the intake so they do not create negative pressure. These units are more effecient and the web based BTU calculator should apply.

Here are the key takeaways:

1. Unless you have a two hose model (which maintains neutral pressure in your room), these portable A/C units are inefficient and are more costly to operate than a conventional through the wall/window air conditioner.

2. If you can, try to get a two hose portable A/C unit. But if not, then you will probably need to increase the portable's BTUs by 50% (or 1.5x) when using a conventional web based BTU calculator. CompactAppliance tried to warn me but I didn't listen. What did you expect from a 13yr old? :-).

3. Do buy from a reputable dealer, such as CompactAppliance. They graciously accepted my return without any hassles. Be sure you always read the vendor's return policy (some have reasonable restocking fees but some won't take it back at all!)

I hope this was helpful.

We just had a record-breaking heat wave. I live in a poorly-insulated house that becomes hot in 85-degree weather, and we hit 100. (Just north of Seattle, WA.) This A/C did a great job of cooling two small rooms (cool one room, move the A/C to another room, cool that one, then back again, for about a week).

Some observations:
1. You MUST vent a portable A/C out a window or into a drop-ceiling, or you just pump the hot air back into the room.
2. Portables seem to work better when elevated (hot air rises, so this helps keep the "convection effect" going by getting closer to the hot air).
3. It's a little noisy. Adding rubber gasket material to the vents reduces the noise a lot by damping the vibrations.
4. An A/C's BTU rating must match the room size, or the unit simply won't work right. This is true of all A/Cs, and seems to be somewhat critical for portables.
5. It acts as a dehumidifier, which means that you have to drain the water tank regularly or the unit will shut off until you do. (An indicator light tells you when you need to drain the tank.)

So, for those who need to cool small rooms, I think this is a good buy. It has been for me.

----------------------------
Follow-Up on Aug 28, 2009:
----------------------------
I just put the a/c into the garage to store until next year. This thing worked beautifully in the small rooms, but I didn't try it in any of the larger rooms.

----------------------------
Follow-Up on Aug 31, 2010:
----------------------------
I just put it into the garage to store until next year. This year I used it in one of the larger rooms because I installed a window a/c in the smaller room, and it did a decent job of keeping the place cool. So far I've had two seasons of trouble-free cooling, so I'd say I got my money's worth. I may buy one more next year for my studio.

So, I live in a studio. Not very big at all. You would think this air conditioner would be able to handle keeping it cool. Well, not so much.

Regardless of how low I set it, or how long I kept it running, it kept my studio at 78 degrees. It was actually a better deal to shut it off, open the windows/door and let the air circulate. It actually got cooler in there once I did that.

Moreover, the hose you connect to the window vent is an eye sore, and isn't flexible enough to let your place the unit somewhere convenient. So you end up having to leave the A/C unit in the middle of the room instead of neatly in a corner or against the wall because the vent hose doesn't allow otherwise.

This is pretty much the worse purchase I have made in a LONG time. Worse of all, it doesn't even make sense for me to return it. The seller charges as 12% "re-stocking fee". Moreover, I would need to carry the huge 70+lbs box up and down stairs to get it back to my work so UPS can pick it up. The box is very flimsy once you remove the nylon ribbons that it comes sealed with, and doesn't really allow you to transport it without spending some money on repackaging.

So yeah, I'm stuck with a $300 70+lbs paper weight. Good times.

[EDITED 07/30]: So I was contacted by the seller (CompactApplience) and their conclusion was that my studio was too big for the 8,000 BTU rating. They actually let me return just the A/C unit without having to worry about packing all the awkwardly-shaped pieces, and reimbursed me for everything, including shipping. Although I've decided NOT to try a different unit with a greater BTU rating, I'm leaving this review here so that hopefully people looking into buying this or any other unit are aware of the importance of considering the size of the room you're trying to cool down when you choose the unit BTU. I was remotely aware of that, but didn't look too much into it, and you saw what happened... Luckily for me, the seller handled the situation superbly well. A happy ending, after all. :)

PROS
about as small and light (50lbs) as they get
comes with remote
comes with window kit
powerful fan
thermostat
very little assembly/packaging

CONS
no accessible drain pan
machine itself only had power button (no controls)
loud

OVERVIEW
I live in a 300sq foot studio with a 15 foot ceiling and a south-facing bay window. My apartment gets hot when it's sunny and is almost always damp/humid. I got the Koldfront because it was the only unit that would fit in my available surface area: on top of my kitchen cabinets. I already had ducting running through my cabinets to vent my over-range microwave, so I popped the Koldfront on top of my cabinet and tied the exhaust into my existing duct work.
It takes the Koldfront about 5-7 minutes to cool my apartment down to habitable from digustingly hot. Technically, I think my space is supposed to be a little too big for this machine, but having it blow cold air across my ceiling seems to do a good job of displacing all the hot air, and since it's located high up, it should be sucking warm air out as it cools the condensers.

I ran this machine for a couple of days at ground level and was less than excited about it's potential, I could actually feel a temperature differential about two feet off the ground between cold and hot air. But moving it closer to my ceiling made all the difference. When it was on the floor, all it did was move air and maybe cool a little bit. Now that it's at ceiling height I'm actually getting chilly.

FAN SPEED
There are three fan speeds: high is pretty loud, and low is still relatively loud. I've gotten used to it pretty quickly though, it pretty much acts as white noise, dampening external sounds.

MODES
AC, Dehumidifier, and Fan are the available mode settings for this machine. I'm happy about these options since you won't always need/want the condensers coming on and off, and you can dehumidify when it's cold out without turning on the AC.

WATER RESERVOIR
The koldfront is supposed to vent humidity out through the ducting, but has a water resevoir for high humidity situations. Unlike some machines, the reservoir isn't a bucket that you can remove from the machine. To drain the reservoir, you have to pull out a little plug at the bottom of the AC, which is about two inches off the ground. That doesn't give you much room to maneuver a drain pan. Fortunately, at 50LBS, it's not too heavy to put in the bathtub and let drain there. The lack of an accessible reservoir is a definite con though. Apparently the Koldfront is made to be able to hard-wire a drain, so that may be an option for some. I ran my machine on and off for a couple of days in San Francisco and it drained something like a cup of water. I don't know the total size of the reservoir, but the drain indicator lite hadn't turned on yet before I drained it.

THERMOSTAT
I've read some reviews complaining of an inaccurate thermostat on the KOLDFRONT, but mine seems to be about spot on.

REMOTE AND LCD PANEL
Don't lose the remote, or if you do, hope you had your Koldfront set exactly how you want to have it because there's no way to change settings without the remote. The remote itself is pretty intuitive, with power, up, down, mode, fan speed, Celsius/Fahrenheit, timer, and cancel buttons. And it comes with batteries. The LCD panel reads the ambient temperature in either Celsius or Fahrenheit until you press the up or down button on the remote, in which case it reads your preset temperature preference. There's a blue/green/yellow LED that indicates whether you're in AC/dehumidifier/ or fan mode, respectively. The information on the LCD is large enough to read from several feed away.

ASSEMBLY
Like most appliances, the Koldfront came with a cardboard cover over the packaging and plastic ties keeping it on. You just cut the ties and lift the cardboard cover off the machine. Inside, there's just a couple pieces of Styrofoam, the AC, and the window kit, plastic duct, instructions, remote, and two AAA batteries for the remote. The AC itself doesn't require any assembly, aside from plugging the duct in. The drain plug on mine had popped out, so I just twisted it back into place. There's a little more involved in assembling the window kit, but the instructions are pretty good on how to get that together. All you need (if your window is the right size) is a phillips head screw driver. The window kit is held into place by the weight of your window and doesn't need to be screwed into the window frame at all.

CONCLUSION
Overall, I'm happy with my Kodlfront. Mine arrived fully functional out of the box, and raising it to ceiling height has made it a lean, mean studio-cooling machine. It's a little bit bigger than I had guessed from the picture, but it's still smaller than most, and fit where I needed it to. It's loud, but inexpensive and has a built in thermostat and remote. Draining it is going to be a hassle, since I've moved it out of easy reach, but there's nothing else on the market that would have worked for me, so four stars for working properly, but not five, because of the lack of controls on the machine, the lack of a removable reservoir, and the loudness of the fan.

This machine is huge, heavy, poorly designed and unable to handle humidity. I just went back and checked the reviews and should have read them before purchasing. I live In an old home with uneven floors but this does not justify the poor performance. In humid conditions the holding tank fills up very quickly and the drain is positioned so low it can only be emptied by placing a cookie sheet under it - which then requires a balancing act to empty... in one instance, the little plug became unseated and the water ran out, damaging the ceiling below. Buy cheap, pay twice - I could not hate this machine any more.

I bought this unit to keep my menopausal roommate comfortable in her room at the back of the house. I live in the central valley of California. We average over 100 the entire month of July, and upper 90s through August (just sayin', you guys who can get cooler than 78 by opening a window). My central air keeps the west end of the house tolerable most of the time, but the east end of the house just never cools off.

So before she moves in, I tell her the back room gets pretty warm and she tut-tuts and assures me that she's one tough broad, and really she is. Only after three nights, she 'fesses up to not sleeping on account of she's so overheated back there. Begin the shopping for a small air conditioner. Here is what I found -- this one is pretty decent looking, it is very reasonably priced, it looks miles better than units costing twice as much. I shopped through Amazon, ordered the thing in 5 minutes or less and the manufacturer notified me within 24 hours that the unit was on its way. Well before the deliver-by date, the unit showed up on my front porch, well-packaged and in perfectly good condition.

The only reason this is a 3 and not a 4 is that the set-up required some extra parts and finagling that we hadn't expected. On the other hand, two cranky, hot, menopausal women got the thing up and running within half an hour, and finished with a pretty decent set-up in another half hour the next night. Roommate says it's a little noisy, but keeps the room cool, looks pretty OK and is way better than sleeping sweaty. Her landlady says she spent way less than she might have for a better product. Both menopausal women less hot, less cranky and generally pretty pleased.

Listen up, everyone!

When buying an air conditioner you MUST make sure that your room is the adequate size for the unit that you are buying. It seems that a lot of negative reviews are due to the following: Too much room, too little BTUs. It is the same with gas mileage on a car. You can't expect to get 35 mpg highway while driving 70 mph with a fully loaded car. However, most portable air conditioners overrated their cooling power by 50% (see a Kid's review). So, when you buy an AC always buy 50% more BTUs than is recommended (8,000 BTU recommended unit should be 12,000 BTU). With that said I would recommend this Koldfront AC unit.

Pros:
Very portable and lightweight
Low noise
Easy to use controls
Price
Has a timer
Compact

Cons:
Will only cool a small room/area
Needs to be drained (DON'T believe what the instructions state)
Should be set on a table or set higher than the drain hose
Does not do a good cooling job when it is humid

So, if you have a small area to cool, live in a low humidity area and want a QUIET portable AC under $300 then this is the one for you.

I've had this AC for about one year and I hardly use it. It's much better to wait until the outside cools down and open all the windows. Like many one-hose portable AC units, the Koldfront draws air into the room from the outside or the rest of the house, which effectively creates a negative pressure into the room. The end result is that you bring as much warn air into your space as you cool down. My room is 144 square feet with 8 ft cielings, so it is not a particularly large space. According to my digital thermometer, my room cooled down by one degree after 5 hours of running. It went from 79 to 78 degrees F. After 5 hours, the unit stopped working and just blew warm air. I live in Southern California, which is not a particulalrly humid environment, and outside was only 85 degrees. If you do buy a portable AC unit, MAKE SURE IT IS A 2 HOSE UNIT.

I puchased this air conditioner less than a year ago and have had no problems with it untill now. it actually worked great untill the real summer heat moved. it stops working as if it overheats and shuts down. funny right, a air conditioner that overheats. this thing works fine in 70 deg. weather but cooling mode shuts down with 80 deg. +. i don't think this is normal. i need my money back.

This is a great, economical portable AC unit that has been a blessing in the Texas heat wave and drought of 2009. We are so dry that all I did was plug it in. No extra water, no venting, it just sits there in the middle of the room and cools. I don't know what all the griping is about except that folk must not have priced these units elsewhere. It was easy to set up and the instructions were clear and in a booklet. The unit saved my life one night when my Central AC went out. It weighs 55 pounds and is on wheels. Best bargain I have found! Home Depot's cheapest offer was an evaporative cooler. Ugh! If we ever have winter, I can put it in a corner until spring.