Air cooling for the win

Two weeks ago, I decided it was time to give in and get a window air conditioner for our bedroom. We'd been relying on a window fan to keep us cool at night, but with the outside air still around 80 degrees at bedtime, it could only do so much. So I found a GE Profile air conditioner with a "saddle" design that could occupy our one bedroom window without obstructing it completely. I figured this would allow us to have A/C on those nights we absolutely needed it, and the rest of the time it would run in fan mode. It would do the same job as our old window fan, except that we wouldn't have to switch it off to keep out light in the morning or water if it started to rain. A win-win, right?

One hundred percent wrong. This thing was a complete horror show, from the moment we took it out of the box until we returned it less than 24 hours later.

The first problem with it was its sheer weight. It took both of us just to drag the box inside and lift the unit onto the bed (which Brian had prepared by laying a sheet of plywood on top, covered with an old quilt). So before attempting to manhandle it into the window, we took the precaution of plugging it in and turning it on to make sure that it actually produced cool air. It did, so we moved on to the massive job of installing it. 

We had checked before buying this air conditioner to make sure that our window had the 13 inches of clearance required to fit it through, and it did, with a tiny bit to spare. But what we didn't realize was that the unit couldn't just go straight into the window. If its full weight came down on the vinyl window frame, it would crush it. So GE had provided two foam spacers with sticky backing that were supposed to sit inside the window frame and create a secure base for it. The problem was, the two pieces were both the same size: roughly 18 inches long, a little under an inch wide, and half an inch thick. A single one wasn't quite tall enough to support the unit, but stacking one on top of the other would make the window opening too small to fit it through.

So we came up with a jury-rigged solution: stacking the two strips together and installing them sideways. Since the width of the strips was a little less than their combined height, our measurements indicated that this would leave us just enough space to squeeze the unit through the window. Since this meant we couldn't use the sticky backing to hold them in place, Brian put down a line of hot glue on the window frame and quickly pressed the joined spacers on top of it. It wasn't super secure, but we figured it only had to hold long enough for us to get the unit through the window.

The next problem we encountered was with the "chase," the top part of the machine. This was, in theory, adjustable to accommodate walls of varying thickness. But when we opened it up to the desired width and then tried to put the screws back in, the screw holes didn't line up. Once again, we had to brute-force a solution, squeezing the tip of each screw into the tiny amount of overlap between the holes and then applying massive torque on the screwdriver to force the screw into place.

After that, we were finally ready to lift the thing into the window. This was the hardest part yet, because the bottom of the A/C unit kept snagging on the spacer strips. This had nothing to do with the unconventional way we'd installed them; the problem was that the unit had two little feet on the bottom, heaven knows what for, that apparently weren't counted as part of its 13-inch height. No matter which way we turned the thing, we could not get both feet around the spacer strips, so in the end we just shoved and shoved until they dug their way across the foam and popped out the other side. After that, it took several minutes to adjust the supports and get the thing snugged up against the outside wall, but compared what we'd already gone through, that was nothing.

However, our problems were not over. The side panels that came with the air conditioner were sized to align with the top of the unit when it was sitting on top of the two stacked spacers. This meant that with our slightly shorter spacer, they extended past the top of the unit. Brian had to shave the tops of them off with a utility knife to get them roughly aligned with the top of the chase before adding a foam weather strip across the top. It still didn't line up perfectly, but the foam was squishy enough that we were able to get the window closed.

At last, we had the thing in place and were ready to turn it on. Since it was fairly cool outside, we decided to run it in fan mode, figuring that it should manage to get the bedroom down to a comfortable temperature in the few hours before bedtime.

This did not happen. I first began to have misgivings an hour or so after we installed it, when I went into the bedroom and found that it was significantly warmer than the rest of the house, where we had the windows open and fans running. But Brian argued that it was just taking some time to disperse all the body heat we'd put into the room while getting the thing installed.

By bedtime, though, the room had not cooled down at all. Brian suggested we turn the air conditioner to cooling mode, but I hated the idea of running A/C when it wasn't actually that hot outside and the rest of the house felt perfectly comfortable without it. I knew I didn't want to rely on it every night, so I figured I'd have to get used to this thing's pathetic excuse for a fan sooner or later

I finally managed to get to sleep by snuggling up to an ice pack. When I woke up the next morning, the pack had turned into a hot-water bottle, the room felt even stuffier than before, and Brian wasn't there. I emerged to find that he had already started up the big fan in the kitchen window and the rest of the house now felt much, much cooler than the bedroom. He had slept even worse than I had. He'd eventually turned the cooling on briefly just to get the room down to a bearable temperature, but when he woke up a few hours later, it was so stifling that he gave up and spent the rest of the night on the sofa. 

Based on this experience, Brian was now convinced that the air conditioner's so-called fan mode didn't actually exchange air with the outdoors. All it did was blow it around the room, creating a little bit of airflow but providing no actual cooling whatsoever. We didn't know whether our unit was defective or it was actually designed this way for some idiotic reason, but one thing was clear: If we wanted to cool our bedroom with outside air for most of the summer and use A/C only in emergencies, this machine wasn't going to do it.

So we spent a good part of that morning wrestling the unit out of the window we'd worked so hard to wrestle it into the day before. This was even harder, since our jury-rigged foam support kept pulling loose and snagging on the machine, but eventually we managed to get it out of the window and back into its box. And even before taking it back to Best Buy (which, fortunately, accepted our return with no difficulties), I had already ordered its replacement: the TRANSOM window fan from Vornado.

Compared to the nightmare of dealing with the air conditioner, installing this was almost ludicrously easy. Lifting it into the window was no problem, since it weighs less than nine pounds. The foam pieces that fit around the edges to block out light came in an assortment of sizes, so we didn't have to do any carving or shoving or squeezing to get a reasonably close fit. (There is a slight gap, but Brian thinks he can fill it with some more of that foam weather-stripping.) And when we plugged it in and turned it on, lo and behold, cool air came into the room.

I can't honestly claim that this fan keeps us every bit as cool and comfortable as an air conditioner would. In fact, in terms of airflow, I'm not really sure it's superior to our old window fan. But it is much more user-friendly. Thanks to its lower profile and weatherproof case, we can simply leave it in the window all summer long, rather than having to move it into the window at night and back out in the morning. It also doesn't admit nearly as much light into the room, so we don't have to make a tradeoff between keeping the room dark and keeping it cool. It even comes with a cute little remote control, in case we want to switch it off or adjust its speed in the middle of the night.

Bottom line: If what you want is a fan 98% of the time and an air conditioner 2% of the time, do not, repeat not, spend $500 on this air conditioner. You're much better off spending $100 on a good window fan and migrating into a room with air conditioning on those rare occasions when you really need it.