Air con unit recommendation

[Purplerain1144]

Hi. I'm looking to buy an air con unit for the summer for our upstairs. 3 bed house, not big at all. Does anyone have any tried and tested recommendations?

In Portugal, where I live, we just buy the cheapest reversible units (about 280 euros) and pay around 220 euros to fit them. These are suitable for 12-15sqm rooms. In the UK the same/similar units cost in excess of £2000 fitted. I don't really understand why. I love air con. It is cheap to run compared with wood burners, stand alone electric/oil radiators, you get immediate heat/cooling and here (at least) it is cheap to install.

Portable or installed?

Daikin

Portable

@Purplerain1144 We have one because Ds was born in a heatwave. They are very heavy and hard to wheel around. You have to vent it out of a window which means the window has to be open. The vent pipes are short so you cannot position it where you want, just literally near a window. A friend of mine has one with a longer vent pipe and they put theirs on their landing and tie the pipe to vent into the loft but it isn't recommended to vertically vent ours.

They do work but we have to move it from one room to another shutting the door of the room we have just cooled. The best things we have found to cool us down is, ceiling fans in the bedrooms, not the greatest look but far better than a standing fan. We also created a "whole house" fan where we put a plywood sheet over the open loft hatch which is on the landing, and cut a hole big enough to seat a fan in (we removed it from the stand base) the fan sits on top inside the loft and faces into the loft with the back of the fan facing into the house so it sucks up air from inside the house. We have a full height over the stairs situation so upstairs gets very hot. We open the windows downstairs in the morning to get the cooler air sucked into the house propping all the doors open. South facing house is now a problem when we get these heat waves in summer.

@CartingItAround

I'm looking ahead at keeping the house cool too - I think we missed a bullet last year. I'm in the SE.

Thank you for your personal experience of the portable AC units, which I'd been considering so this is useful. I'd also been thinking of ceiling fans so do you have any recommendations? Are they quiet and easy to fit for example?

@Abracadabra12345 mine were just from Argos several years ago but I have checked and they don't have the same ones but this is similar https://www.argos.co.uk/product/3611506?clickSR=slp:term:ceiling%20fan:6:12:1

They are far less noisy than a stand fan and ours is directly above our bed whereas the children's ones are to the side but they are very effective at moving air around and cooling the body. They are easy to fit in the sense that you have to wire them in like you would a light fitting.

Another tip for staying cool is to use a spray bottle of water and spray your body before bed and then the fan cools the body by evaporating the water.

This is great, thank you!

Did you manage to have air conditioning installed

We got a portable one from argos about 175 quid and it's pretty good!