Do you have a portable air con??

We are in a dilemma! We live in a 3rd floor unit which get the full sun all day. Our place gets HOT! We have an air con in the main bedroom (which is heaven!) and loungeroom (which doesn't work well). Neither of them will cool the kids bedroom, which recieves the full afternoon sun from about 1pm.

At the moment DS and DD are co sleeping in our bedroom so it's not a problem, but at chrissy time while DH and I are on leave together, we have plans of getting the kids out of our room and into theirs. The problem is though that their room is a sauna! It gets sooo hot in there and I can't put them in there when it is so hot, it's not fair for them when they could sleep in our room.

We have been looking at getting an aircon for their room too. We can't get a wall mounted one cause we're on the third floor and their room has no access from outside to mount any kind of things (the motor bit!) they might need to outside. DH doesn't want a window one because we would have to get the window altered and that's more $$$, plus being on the third floor, it might be dangerous if the kids could push it out or something and fall out the window....

So we're thinking a portable aircon. We can use it in the kids room and take it with us when we move one day. And since the lounge room aircon doesn't work so well, maybe we could use it in the lounge on really hot days...But I have heard they can be a bit dodgy. The kids room is only fairly small. DH has worked out the dimensions and how big the aircon would need to be. But I have heard that they don't work for some places. Can't remember why though!

Do you have a protable aircon? Does it work well for the room you use it in? Are they value for money??

We have one. We had two, but the smaller, older unit that we bought second hand has died.

Living in rental properties, it has been heaven. They don't work well in open-plan areas and you need to be able to vent them to the outside. We lived in one house where they helped, but the whole place would just get intolerably hot.

Since moving to a place that has a wall-mounted unit big enough to cool the open-plan kitchen/dining/lounge area and do a good job on the study and Sam's bedroom, we really only use the portable unit in our bedroom. Our bedroom gets the afternoon sun and we close it off during the day so it's nice to have something in there to cool the place down before going to bed. We have at times needed to run it over night (more so in the old house than here), and it is a bit noisy, but we can still sleep with it.

That's the other down-side to them - they are a bit noisy, but when it's a choice of hot or noisy, I take noisy as it's pretty much a white-noise situation and doesn't bother me.

BW

Yep we bought one for both the girls rooms cause our upstairs is terrible on a warm day.
Works well for the area, not huge rooms, we put them on about 1-2 hrs before they go to bed (depending on how warm it is) and it cools it nicely.
Never been a problem with the noise.
Only downside with ours is our windows are windout ones which means you can't get a proper seal on the window, they come with window kits but only work on non wind out ones.
Even so we still find the rooms cool well.

We have 2 - a split-system model (has a compressor unit that sits outside) and another which has a fat tube that vents out a window. Both Pinguinos, both very effective, do well in a large room. The problem you will have with being a unit is that you will need to think about how to keep your windows locked in the open position (where the vent is) so there are no safety issues with kiddies falling out windows. I suggest you go and have a look at some models, you will get an idea of what the vents look like and you will be able to plan what you want.

we had one before we got more permanent air con (we have just moved into a new house and now are back to square one again)...

we had an old fashioned house, with windows that slide open vertically, but if your windows slide open horizontally, it will also work well with the air con vent that needs to slot in. if your windows wind outwards it is not going to be ideal having a portable air con vent attached to the window...

i just wanted to mention something i saw the other night at our local pub.... they had two of the more modern air conditioner units (i think they are called split systems?) mounted on INTERNAL WALLS, with a tube coming out of the unit and going up into the ceiling and probably outside somewhere... i have never seen this before, and have always been told that air conditioners must be mounted on an external wall, yet here before my very eyes are two air conditioners with these tubes taking the hot air outside.... definitely worth investigating!!

in my experience portable air cons are only good if you have the right window to get a good seal around the vent, and also if it is a small closable room (ie with a door, not open plan)...

in any case they are better than nothing, but i would be asking some air con installers about those tube thingie's that i saw.... they didn't look too bad at all.

We have an evaporative Bonaire one. I got it when I used to work for them. It doesn't attach to a window or anything but being evaporative you need it near a window to get it to full advantage. I use it to cool down our kids rooms as they are going to sleep on hot days.

We don't have any other air con at all. Only ceiling fans in all bedrooms.

If you have like a balcony area anywhwere in your unit you can get a fixed mounted split system aircon unit, The pipes and wires run from the main unit which would be on your balcony to the vent unit which would be on an internal wall in the bedroom.....mum and dad have one on an internal wall in their lounge and the two components are no where near each other...the wires and the condensation pipe run through the walls/ceiling cavity to the outside unit that runs it...the other advantage of this is that the noisy bit is outside and would keep the bedroom whisper quiet.....just a thought

Oh and in their last house they had a two storey house,,,the main unit was on the ground floor outside and the vent unit was up on the second floor so they can be placed a fair distance apart...

YOu poor thing...this heat has been terrible in sydney of late - dont know how your surviving without a/c.
Dont know much about portable air cons...melbels idea sounds like a good one though. Another way to keep the room a bit cooler - you have to stop the sun frm hitting the bedroom window...how do youd o that ?? have you seen those cloth awnings - they wind out and in ? have you got heavy duty curtains on the windows ?? it may all sound silly, but our bedroom gets arvo sun. We got a awning thing erected about 6 years ago, and i made some really heavy duty curtains....it defn makes a difference.

Maybe worth getting a air con person out to give you some ideas...wouldnt hurt to get a price..???

We have a portable refridgerative aircon in the kids room and it works great - need to put the tube out the window and empty the water tray each day but it works well in a small room.

Keep in mine evaporative aircon is cheaper but works better in hot dry areas, in humidity you need refrigerative aircon.

Thanks everyone :)

melbel, thanks for that, I might look into it. I wonder if it would come for a free quote...surely they would! We have two split systems already, but our bedroom and lounge both go onto our balcony so it wasn't an issue to have it all connected and whatever (I know nothing about air cons...can you tell, lol!). I don't know how they could do it in the kids room though. I owuld rather a split system in there I think if I can.

mbear, We do have vertical blinds and thick curtains on their window. I open the window/blinds through the night and early morning and close it in the later morning to try to maximise the cool air coming in and keeping out the hot air. I would love to get thicker plastic backed curtains, but we don't have the $$ at the moment. We can't have any kind of awning or block out shutters on the windows because we can't alter the outside of the building, being a unit block. And yes this heat sucks big time without any kind of cooling in the living area. Especially in a top floor unit! I just put DD into our bed cause she wouldn't go to sleep in her room. She passed out in about 5mins in my bed! I don't know how people cope without ai rconditioning, I'm such a wuss in the heat!

We thought of a ceiling fan but I don't think it would work well since it would just be blowing around the hot air. I should get a thermometre in there and see how hot it actually does get in there in the height of summer. Gosh it's not even full summer yet!! My poor babies are going to roast!

The windows in there are the sliding ones, vertical. I'm not sure how I would block it off though....maybe thick cardboard or something?? And a block of wood in the tracks of the sliding bit so the kids couldn't open it more....hmmm, would have to give that some thought! I hate having the window open when they're in there.

Againg thanks to everyone for your answers they have given me some food for thought!

We bought one from Bunnings.. Was $500 and it is a 12000btu. It doesn't work that great on super hot days. but takes the heat out. Dh is using at the moment for night shifts (thanks to our window one dying)

We are pretty happy with it though. We run it out in the front entrance along with our split system lounge one and it cools the whole house. We just close the bedroom and bathroom doors. and at night we open them and run both and it keeps us all cool..