8 Best Portable Air Conditioners of 2023

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Keep your cool with these portable appliances.

Summer is hot and sticky, but that doesn't mean your bedroom, home office, or den has to be. The solution to summer air and all its discomfort is the portable air conditioner, a small appliance that uses an ice-cold metal coil and a fan to convert hot and humid air into dry, cool, comfortable air. Since, it's far more portable than air conditioners that are window units, you can roll a portable air conditioner to the room where it will do the most good.

Portable air conditioners take in air that's hot, stale, and humid, and blow it over a cold metal coil. Inside the coil is refrigerant gas that's at a much lower temperature than the room's air. The temperature of the air drops as it passes over the cold coil. This cold air enters the room and begins to mix with the hot air in the room, lowering its temperature. Meanwhile, the appliance draws in moisture vapor suspended in the room's air. There, it comes into contact with the cold coil surface. The vapor in the air condenses on the coil, drips off, and collects inside of a pan for easy dumping.

As for the cold refrigerant gas, it gets sucked back to a compressor, where it changes phase, converting from a gas to a liquid. At this point, all its heat energy is concentrated in a small area. A fan blows over this hot coil, and the heat energy is released outside.

Known as condensate, the water that was condensed out of the air may be disposed of in any number of ways. You can remove the pan and dump it. Or the air conditioner itself may sling the moisture against the hot part of the coil where it will be converted back to vapor and expelled in the exhaust. In the rare instances where the portable air conditioner is located near a floor drain, the condensate can be simply run through a tube to the drain. In other cases, the tube leading from the air conditioner's drain pan can lead to a condensate pump that will pump the liquid water to the outside or to a drain elsewhere in the building.

Some portable air conditioners have one hose while others have two. One-hose appliances take in cooled room air and use it to cool the extremely hot condenser coil. They blow the heated air outside. Two-hose models are slightly more complex and may be more expensive than some single-hose models. One hose takes in outdoor air and uses it to cool the hot condenser coil and then discharges the heated air through the second hose. Some of these dual-hose appliances are configured as a hose within a hose so that only one hose is visible.

It's logical to ask whether a single hose appliance is better than a dual-hose model or vice versa. There's no simple answer to that. Single-hose models create a slight pressure drop inside the house, since they are exhausting indoor air in the process of cooling the condenser. This negative pressure causes the living space to draw increased air from the outdoors in order to maintain a pressure equilibrium.

To solve the pressure drop problem, manufacturers invented the dual-hose design, which uses warm outdoor air to reduce the temperature of the condenser. The appliance does not eject indoor air, thus the air pressure inside the dwelling remains more consistent. That's not a perfect solution, however, since now you have two large, warm hoses in the living space that you are trying to cool.

A lot of numbers are attached to a portable air conditioner that describe its cooling capacity, so selecting the right size appliance to meet your needs seems difficult. Knowing that their own government-required data will seem opaque to most people, manufacturers cut through the haze and give you an estimated room size that the appliance should cool. They use the room's floor size expressed in square feet. And this assumes an average ceiling height. Use this number to size the appliance.

By way of background:

Much of the difficulty arises from the BTU numbers that manufacturers are required to provide. There are two of these. One is the BTU rating developed by the American Society of Heating Refrigeration Engineers (ASHRAE). The ASHRAE BTU number gives you a base line estimate of the appliance's basic heat-removal capacity. The second number is the SACC BTU, for seasonally-adjusted cooling capacity. It's also a description of the appliance's heat removal power, given in BTUs. However, the SACC BTU takes in more variables than the ASHRAE number and is derived using a more complex method.

Manufacturers do not provide the information on how to use those BTU numbers to size your appliance. Rather, they do the hard work for you; their engineers take the BTU rating and translate it into a room size (the floor area in square feet).

All you need to do is either estimate your room size or take a tape measure and make a formal calculation of its floor area. If the room is especially hot in the summer (it's in an attic or has large, south-facing windows) move up to the next larger size appliance, assuming you can afford it.

We place each air conditioner one at a time in a warm room, direct its discharge hose to the outside, and set the appliance's temperature to 68 degrees and its fan speed to maximum. We aim the appliance to discharge cold air at a target 8 feet away. Then we measure the temperature at four locations on the target using an infrared thermometer. We also check the appliance's outlet temperature (it should be consistent and a lot hotter than what the air conditioner is putting into the room). We run the appliances on a hard surface that amplifies rattles and squeaks.

LG's portable air conditioner was the fastest cooling appliance that we tested. After we set the temperature and fan speed, it was blowing ice cold air before we could even return to our notes. That's a big benefit due to the dual inverter compressor on this appliance. That's not marketing hype. The feature uses twin rotating compressor rings. The two rings are offcentered, thus compression is occuring in one of the rings when the other is not compressing refrigerant. The result is a more mechanically and electrically efficient compressor and one that comes up to operating temperature approximately twice as fast as comparable compressors.

And the automatic movement of the discharge louvers ensured even temperature distribution directed toward the target. It held its temperature very well.

Given those features and the appliance's large BTU number, this LG portable unit is well suited for large apartments or office areas that might need extra cooling capacity due to digital equipment. We believe this appliance would more capably cool up to its rated capacity than many other air conditioners of similar rating. That's another benefit of the dual inverter compressor design and the appliance's robust construction.

In terms of maintenance, the LP1419IVSM is very good. Two grills cover its twin air filters, and neither requires tools for removal. The top grill is particularly well designed with an easy lift-off feature. And the appliance was among the sleekest tested. Its cabinet has few seams and its glossy exterior is easy to keep clean looking. A simple wipe with a moist soft cloth is all it takes to keep the LG free of finger prints and dust.

More: Best Ductless Air Conditioners

We were pleasantly surpirsed by the quietness and value offered by this small air conditioner. It begins producing cold air very quickly and even if it doesn't produce the gushing volume of cold air that other air conditioners nearby do, it does quickly and quietly bring down air and surface temperatures in its vicinity. For your money, you get multiple fan speeds, dedicated dehumidification, timed setting, and a sleep setting. Note that there is no heater setting on this appliance. It's dedicated to cooling and deshumidification. For most users, this three-season versatility is enough.Check marks against it: A small one. Its remote is small, light, easy to use, and works well. It doesn't come with batteries, though, so if you want to start cooling and use the remote, pick up a pair of AAA batteries as well.

Black + Decker's little air conditioner also provides for dedicated dehumidification. Press the control panel button until the blue LED is illuminated next to the water drop icon, and dh appears on the screen. You can use this in exceptionally humid conditions or if you need to help keep a basement, for example, more comfortable simply by removing the humidity in its air.

This is portable air conditioning at its smallest, simplest and least expensive. The Hisense is not a cooling power house; it's rated to cool a room with a floor area up to 300 square feet. We found in our test that it will work harder and longer to bring down the temperature of a hot room and keep it there. By no means do we see that as a check mark against this petite appliance. It's simple thermodynamics. If you need to cool a larger volume of air or a hotter and more humid environment, then buy a larger and more expensive portable air conditioner. As for the Hisense, it goes about its work quietly and very simply. It has manually adjusted side-to-side louvers, and you never need to drain its condensate or empty its pan. Its fan has two speeds, high and low, and the appliance operates on three settings: cool, dehumidification and fan. It has sleep and timer functions (as do most portable air conditioners today). We particularly liked the large and easily accessible air filter and grill on the back of the appliance. You don't need tools to swing down the grill and slide out the filter. With some air conditioners, you need a small Phillips screwdriver. to detach the grill. Not the Hisense. It's highly simple.

To clean the air filter on the Hisense, flip down the tool-free grill on its back and unsnap the filter from the grill. Wash the filter, pat it dry, and then re-insert it. The whole operation takes minutes. There's no need to find a Phillips screwdriver with a small enough tip to detach the grill, as you do on other appliances. This may be a small appliance, but it has thoughtful details.

If you just need to cool a small space, there's no sense in getting a larger air conditioner than you need. You can save space, money, and energy with this appropriately-sized air conditioner from Midea. It's not an Energy Star-rated appliance, it uses next-generation R32 refrigerant, has a perfectly respectable efficiency (CEER) of 10.9, and a modest current draw of 7.3 amps while cooling. Its remote senses the temperature and allows you to adjust the cooling.

When the air conditioner broke down in the computer server room at our office building, we wheeled the Midea in there to get the temperature back under control. It did and in a hurry, too. It's among the fastest portable air conditioners we've recently tested. Once you set it to cool, literally seconds later it's blowing cold air. It's also a fully featured appliance, if you need four-season versatility. It has settings for cool, dry, fan, and heat. Its Auto setting will cycle the appliance from cooling, to heating, to fan, depending on what temperature it senses in its operating area and the temperature to which you have it set.

Like larger and reasonably sophisticated appliances, the Midea's outlet can be fixed in position or it can oscillate back and forth automatically. You can also adjust its swing, for example, you can select the outlet's degree of travel for more horizontal and less vertical distribution of its cold air–or vice versa.

We liked everything about the Midea, but we found its hose to be rather short. Although we're sure it will work in almost all situations, you may have to re-arrange furniture to ensure that you have the Midea optimally located and pointed in the direction it needs. Providing it with a slightly longer hose could help reduce the need for shuffling furniture around to accomodate the air conditioner.

The Midea's outlet slowly oscillates back and forth. You can also control the degree of its movement or even stop its oscillation at any angle to suit you.

This Whynter's amperage and BTU capacity position it firmly in the heavy-duty cooling category (and the heavy category—this portable air conditioner weighs 80 pounds). It's a dual-hose (intake and exhaust), which, theoretically, should reduce the amount of condensate that the A/C collects, since it's supposed to be removed in the exhaust air stream. A similar model (ARC-14SH) also operates in heat pump/heater mode. For a slightly smaller model, check out the Whynter Elite ARC-122DS above.

With a rated cooling area of about 250 square feet, this little GE appliance is a perfect fit for the home office. Its front grill and louver design have a distinct horizontal discharge bias. That means its most effective cooling zone is directed right about where you’re seated at your desk. Plus, its 24-hour timer allows you to set it up to begin cooling in the early morning. It's a great way to start your work day in an office that's already cool, dry, and comfortable. Weighing only 44 pounds, it's a snap to wheel out of the way and stash it in a corner.

Two specific design attributes of the Frigidaire make it attractive: powerful, high-BTU cooling capacity and a cylinder shape that is unlike any portable air conditioner we’ve reviewed. And if you like to automate your tech, you’ll dig the Frigidaire app that lets you run this appliance remotely. The on-machine controls are simple and intuitive: A large panel on the front with a row of buttons below helps you set modes and fan speed. And a cleanly designed, pancake-shaped remote control nests into the appliance's top. By pancake shape, we mean something like the iconic Honeywell wall thermostat: round and simple. Finally, Frigidaire makes it easy to get service or parts should the air conditioner break or wear out.

Sleek styling, high efficiency, and convenient features all meet in Delonghi's PACEM360, rated to cool and dehumidify rooms up to 400 square feet. Given the respectable performance we’ve seen from DeLonghi appliances in other tests, we’re inclined to think that its rated cooling capacity is accurate. We like the handy placement of its remote—on top and easily visible. The appliance's 24-hour timer can help you manage your cooling load, and the low setting is especially designed for nighttime comfort and to help you get a good sleep.

This appliance is a dual-hose design. One hose pulls in outdoor air and then filters, cools, and dehumidifies it before blowing it into the room. The other hose takes warm air and ejects it to the outdoors. The design prevents the appliance from significantly lowering the air pressure in the cooled space, which can pull in warm, humid air from the outside or building cavities such as the attic. We also like that it creates very little condensate, so you won't have to empty its collection tank as often.

Roy Berendsohn has worked for more than 25 years at Popular Mechanics, where he has written on carpentry, masonry, painting, plumbing, electrical, woodworking, blacksmithing, welding, lawn care, chainsaw use, and outdoor power equipment. When he's not working on his own house, he volunteers with Sovereign Grace Church doing home repair for families in rural, suburban and urban locations throughout central and southern New Jersey.

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