Most air conditioners are fixed in place, and need trained technicians to install them. Whether the air con is in the car, caravan, truck cab, or in your home, real mobility is not an option.

The good news is that technology has advanced and now there are real mobile air con solutions.

You might be thinking that a portable is a mobile air conditioning unit.  Here’s a photo of a portable air conditioner. We can see the wheels, so it must be mobile, right?

Actually no, not really.

Especially with air conditioning, looks can be deceptive. Like many advertising images, this photograph does not show the large pipe from the machine to the window. The next photo shows a real bedroom installation with a similar machine.

Now we can see the pipe that these so-called ‘portable’ units need to exhaust hot air to the outside. These machines are large and you need two people to carry them. Then there’s the fiddly window kit to hold the large pipe in place. With many windows, like the one shown, there are still gaps so the hot air from outside (and some from the pipe) gets sucked back into the room.

To get cooling power anywhere near a mini-split, you need a unit with two pipes, one to bring in outside air and the other to exhaust the warm air.

So the so-called portable air conditioner is not portable, and nor is it mobile and easily moved from room to room, let alone home to work or to your favourite retreat. They weigh 50 – 80 lbs, and they’re also noisy. Unless you have a two pipe model, they only provide a few degrees of cooling too. Learn more here

To add to the confusion, if you search for “mobile air conditioner” or even “mobile aircon”, you will be offered sites showing you evaporative air coolers. Here there are very small, light weight, truly mobile units.

However, they actually provide very little cooling. We measure cooling in terms of BTU/hr or kilowatts. A small water cooler will generate 100 – 200 BTU/hr in dry air. In humid air, the cooling will be much less. To cool a whole room, you need at least 10,000 BTU/hr, fifty times more, so don’t expect much from these coolers unless it’s next to your face and the humidity is low.

There are much larger evaporative water coolers, but they’re not really mobile other than having wheels on them.

There are a few small portable A/C’s available these days but they are not all created equal.

A Coolzy uses patented technology so that it can use the smallest components, which use the least electricity. This makes the Coolzy the smallest portable AC and also the quietest. It is by FAR the best solution for a small room portable AC.

Cooling a room means you’re cooling all of the furniture, the walls, the floor and the ceiling. The reason is that as you remove energy (in the form of heat) form the room, the energy from these other areas seeps in. This energy needs to be continuously removed until there is none left and the room is now cool.

To cool a small room, an A/C needs to produce around 10,000 BTU (short for British Thermal Units) of cooling. This is the equivalent of around 1kw of electricity usage. This is the minimum required because there are other factors to consider. For instance, a 1kw portable AC has a large pipe to duct the warm air from the room. This pipe gets hot and radiates heat back into the room, causing the room to heat! It’s effectively fighting itself to create cool air and comfort for the small room.

A Coolzy is the opposite. A Coolzy uses 340w of electricity to generate 4650 BTU. While this won’t cool the whole room, it will generate enough cool air to blow at someone in the room, thus making the person comfortable. The added benefit is that the Coolzy is smaller (smaller components), makes less noise and uses less electricity to get the job done.