Cooling with portable AC, 26.6°C too hot for living room.

[ericmark]

I have a portable AC which will stop room getting too hot, but once hot, not very good at cooling it again. So at midday (1 pm BST) my living room at 26.6°C so turned the AC on. But really too late, all windows closed, one internal door has a gnome stopping the door fully closing to allow cats in and out, and also allows replacement air for the hot air the AC put up the chimney.

Clearly using more power

but still exporting

so not really worried about the cost to run. But can I get a bigger unit? It says 755 watt load, and cooling 7000 Btu/hour so 2 kW/h which seems to be a standard size for portable units.

It has dropped the temperature ½°C in half an hour, but that is still 26.1°C, if I run a second, the question is where to route the hot air, only have one chimney. And the windows open with side hinges, so the adaptors allow loads of hot air back in.

Can't see a method to improve it, but always worth asking in case.

 

[flameport]

I have a portable AC

If it's like most of them which has a single flexi hose for the hot air, then you are wasting your time.
It's continually sucking in more hot air while removing the air it has just cooled.

A proper design would have 2 hoses to the outside, one for inlet and one for outlet, and the room air would be recirculated.

 

[Old Salt]

You can get a kit to fit the opened window. Velcro with sticky tape to window frame with zipped enclosure for the vent. My daughter uses one and it seems to work okay. Different sizes are available from amazon to fit the frames.

The absolutely most important thing is to stop the heat getting in. All windows closed, curtains and blinds drawn. I have a split unit a/c with 2 wall mounted units supplying the main bedroom and lounge. Kept the bungalow at a steady 23.3 on eco setting. With internal doors open the temperature soon permeates the other rooms.

 

[Rodders53]

Our bedroom split pack, 3.5 kW rated indoor unit was on full bore for just over an hour last night to get the temperature from 25.9 C to 21.6 C (and humidity from 56% to 46%). Fan too noisy to sleep with, but at lowest fan speed, temp only reached the target 19 C after 7 more hours of running.
(Bedroom is quite large area. Temp/humidity monitor is in an IR blaster).

Will run for longer tonight at max to get it lower in time for bed!

With the portable aircon pack we had the vent went through a wall airbrick re-purposed. Pipe as short as possible and 'lagged' with a towel/blanket to reduce heat back into room. The (damp) hot air exhaust negated the need to empty condensate tank! Exceedingly noisy though.
Pretty sure it was more than 7000BTU.
Probably a 12000BTU = 3.5kW unit drawing around 1100 Watts of electric.

7000, 9000 and 12000 BTU are standard portable unit sizes.

Sitting in lounge at a comfortable 21 C via the bedroom's twin 3.5 kW split pack unit on a nearly silent low speed as I write this. Worth every penny of install and running costs.

If you want decent air to air heating/aircon talk to some F-gas installers to get the options that can suit your specific dwelling and price range.