Is it worth getting air conditioning units for bedrooms?

[CoffeeLover87]

Hi all,
Is anyone else finding the summers just get hotter every year? I am not a big fan of heat anything above 28 degrees it’s become unbearable for me. We’re seriously thinking about installing air conditioning units in our bedrooms – the kind that do both hot and cold, so they’re useful year-round. Has anyone gone down this route? Are they worth the cost to install and run?

Thanks in Advance ! 😊

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MNHQ

It works really well - ours is a Chilly. I think we’ve had it five years now, and we hook it up every June or so and it stays connected into September. In terms of cooling, it cools the bedroom quickly and efficiently. The downsides are that the portable units have a hose that needs to go through window, so it means your windows are always open (albeit with a sort of mesh covering with a hole for the hose) and it’s a bit unsightly, plus our mesh does flap about a bit on a windy day! You can just take hose out and close window but it gets a bit annoying redoing the hose every time you want to use it, so we tend to just leave it.

It is quite bulky too and takes up a fair bit of space.

That and the aesthetics thing are the only reasons I would upgrade, in terms of actual cooling it works great.

Sadly, yes. Not in bungalows I've seen as most new houses here have two storeys.

@U53rn8m3ch8ng3 You don’t understand insulation and how it works. All houses should breathe. You cannot seal a house in the uk or you seal in damp or condensation. Insulation is in walls, roofspwce and possibly double glazing. We have a well insulated house but the only hot area is the loft. We don’t live in the loft. Elsewhere utilizing fans, open windows and the fact we are partially open plan all help the house stay cool. I’m not a fan of drawing curtains in the day but curtains keep out direct sun well. High levels of insulation are far more cost effective in the uk for most of the year than running air conditioning for a few weeks. Fans are much cheaper.

Neither keeping the curtains drawn nor opening windows makes much difference when the temperature outside is the same as inside. Fans just blow the warm or hot air around so absolutely pointless.

Going back to air conditioning could I ask about how the electrics work? I don't like trunking so will the installers channel the wires and then make good afterwards?

Maybe for where you are, but where I am in Oxfordshire, it is an issue every summer for us in our home.

Our home is an oven even in the late evenings with windows open. It’s warmer in our home than it is outside. DH runs much colder than the rest of us and he is even sweating and struggling. I water outside around 10 pm and it is a massive difference in temperature between outside and just our kitchen.

I will see if we can have some of the insulation removed because it is more hot than it ever is cold in our area. We get maybe three days of snow and/or ice max a year and it is rarely ever so cold that the heating needs to be on for days on end.

Do you realise how patronising you sound?

Yes we should all make the climate crisis worse by getting air-conditioning.

Not only is there the embedded energy used in their manufacture but there's the energy they use to keep them running.

Get a much more environmentally friendly large ceiling fan for the every few years we have hot weather for more than a week. There's plenty of silent modern ones about and they're very effective without being a planet killer.

Create UK do some lovely ones.

more reliable brands are Daikin and Mitsubishi. We have them in all bedrooms and found that they were so efficient we ended up going to bed around 7pm just to get relief from the heat 😂 so in the end got installed in living room too. Just pure bliss and the newer ones can be controlled via an app hooked up to WiFi so can turn on before you even get home. Do it - you won’t look back

YES

Got it installed last October, after another summer of oppressive heat upstairs in our house (bog basic 80's detached). We got it installed in each of the 3 upstairs bedrooms, all running off one external fan unit. Took about 1.5 days to fully install and not inconvenient at all (as in, rooms were fine to sleep in the night between the installation days - the units were fully installed on day 1 in rooms, so day 2 was just finishing off the ducting pipework).

It was also far cheaper than we anticipated it'd be. We ended up using the heat function a bit in winter to give quick boost when kids were getting dressed in the morning and have been using the aircon in the evenings for past couple of weeks. Sleeping soundly!

@phoenixrosehere I’m in the next county east of you. Cannot see much difference and our house is fine. Do you have decent fans? Really are great.

@U53rn8m3ch8ng3 Why are explanations patronising? Do you think all people who might actually know something are patronising? Your doctor maybe?

I really want one but worried about the environmental impact

Yes, we have fans, several, but still too hot.

We have a new build and only from a previous poster mentioning that they tend to have more insulation that we are now considering to see if it is possible to remove some.

Our last home was an older home, not a new build, 20 minutes from this one and had an issue with getting too hot as well and yes, we had good fans there.

In this weather. Absolutely worth every penny. We have solar panels so run them off those as much as we can. Currently heavily pregnant and they are the best purchase we have ever made IMO.

we are also thinking of getting built in aircon in the bedrooms. Don’t think I would choose to use it as heating but I’ve been properly miserable this week (tired too) and thinking to our recent holiday in Italy where we had similar temperatures but our villa was lovely and cool and we had no problems sleeping. News reports seem to suggest that hotter summers will be more frequent so if you can afford it then it seems a good idea.

We've got three of the hose out of window units and they're worth every penny in this heat. We've also got solar panels so they're not running the electric bill up.

Yeah, I kind of tried that during the many years I was living without aircon. I also did it in my home office yesterday since I wasn't WFH and I do actually take all possible action to minimise aircon use. It was still 30C in there when I went to bed at 11pm. Also not that useful when I need to be able to function in that room during the day. I had days of trying to work with the internal temperature at 35C before we got aircon.

We bought one and it was so loud it went back. Can anyone recommend a quiet one?

We have one portable unit upstairs. We keep curtains closed etc in the day and use it to cool down each bedroom in turn before bed. Just run for 30 mins or so in each room, sometimes a bit longer, but never overnight. It's only for a few nights a year really, we haven't used it so far this year. We put the pipe out of an open window and use a pillow to plug the rest of the gap. It's a bit of a faff but it's only occasional and I prefer having just one thing, not 4.

I'm with @echt, sometimes the area of window openers is too small relative to the volume of the rooms to cool down the room effectively overnight. Good insulation will keep the worst of the heat out, but there is still a need for rooms to lose that excess heat overnight, and there's a problem if they can't.

Ours is ducted, minimal mess where they cut out the plasterboard in the ceiling for the vents, 2 in each room. 2 days to install and after a quick hoover you’d never have known they’d been.

We do have solar panels so can’t comment on what it costs to run though.

Yes we have them. Amazing. Especially as I have postpartum sweats each night!!

@FunJadePlayerwe used All Kent Cooling - they weren’t the cheapest quote we got but they were the most professional and reliable, turned up on time both days - polite, hard working and kept everything tidy. Our 2 sets of neighbours are having theirs done in July and early August now though so definitely busy time of year for them.

Your presumption that I don't know anything is patronising. You clearly absolutely can't see anyone's view point about why aircon is so good and that fans really just aren't the same. Go find a friend with aircon and you'll see.

Good idea, our last house was a newbuild and very well insulated, it was 3 storey and the top floor was practically unusable in the summer. I like being hot, but it was ridiculous. Now we live in an old cottage and it stays at a much more bearable temperature.

You think I don’t know what air con is like? Really? How patronising. I do, however I don’t want ugly units in my rooms. It does dry out the air and is not much use for the rest of the year.

Part of our house is 15 years old. We have the luxury of getting air moving in rooms we are using and fairly large opening doors. 6 if I include the front door. We have high levels of insulation because we generate our electricity as much as we can and store it in batteries. So keeping the heat in the house in winter is a priority. However walls breathe and getting airflow through space cools it dorm we find. However we have no south facing windows. This helps too.

@SendBooksAndTea Was the top sort in effect loft space? We have a holiday townhouse and the top floor is actually living space. We have windows and fans but it’s more difficult to cool down than home.,

Also I’ve no frutnds with air con. DH’s office had it.