When I talk about air conditioners, I picture a funny web meme. Turning off the air conditioner provides you a tiny bit additional power for the wheels in gas-powered cars and some EVs. The difference can be felt if your engine is small. It therefore has the effect of making you feel like the captain of the Enterprise ordering engineering to switch power from life support to the impulse engines when you press the button to turn the AC compressor off.
Calling your air conditioning on life support may seem unnecessarily dramatic to people who live in Canada (or, if you’re my pal Earl of Frunkpuppy , Alaska presently), but it just proves you’ve never spent any time in Phoenix in June. My modest apartment’s air conditioning system failed when I had just graduated from college and the entire complex’s air conditioning system failed at the same time. We endured for three days and three nights, and in the end, to prevent becoming sick from the heat, I took my entire family to work for a few days.
So, yes, in some countries, air conditioning really is life support. Without it, even a few hours can make you ill or perhaps kill you.
It’s a good idea to have some backup air conditioning in the desert. Even if you can only keep one room cool, it could provide you with a lifeboat so you don’t have to travel to a cooling facility or drive around while the power is out. Additionally, having a portable battery-powered air conditioner might make a significant difference in whether you want to camp in the low country when it’s going to be hot outside.
I was therefore pleased to learn that EcoFlow wanted to send me an Wave portable air conditioner to test because I live in the desert and enjoy camping (disclosure: and keep for long-term review).
SPECIFICATIONS ANDAMP; FEATURES To start, although being portable, it is not lightweight. It weighs over 40 pounds without the add-on battery. The weight is increased to around 55 pounds by the add-on battery. You won’t use it for hiking, of course, but you can use it for car camping or unexpected house needs. It has two incredibly strong handles that make transporting it quite simple.
Because it is a twin hose air conditioner, you must run the supplied hoses outside of the area you wish to cool. The other hose forces hot air back out while the first hose pulls in fresh ambient air. For windows in homes, you can purchase sealing systems or make your own DIY board with the proper-sized holes for the hoses. Put the hoses through the tent door and pull the zipper as far down as you can onto the hoses. A Shiftpod is one example of an insulated tent with holes designed specifically for this.
The other choice is to attach the accompanying shroud to the AC unit’s cold air exit or vent, or what I like to refer to as its business end. If you do that, you may leave the entire device outside and use a single, smaller hose to pipe the cold air into the tent or room (included). But bear in mind that the device is neither waterproof or dustproof, so leaving it outside is generally not a good idea unless you are certain that it won’t get wet or dusty or you’ve taken other protective measures.
Don’t expect to use it to cool a house; instead, use it to cool a smaller room, a tent, or the majority of RVs. It only produces 4,000 BTUs. It also has WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, although I haven’t tried using a smartphone to control it yet.
Here are all the details:
POWERING IT: HOW YOU CAN The device can be powered in a number of ways.
First, you can use a 110v household power socket to supply it with AC power. It will draw roughly 700 watts until the add-on battery is fully charged if you are cooling and charging it at the same time. A maximum of 400 watts will be required for cooling with or without a battery. That air conditioner is quite effective.
Additionally, you can use a car power outlet or 200 watts of solar electricity that is connected directly to the device to power it. Without the AC running, it can charge the add-on battery in 5 hours even if I don’t have a compatible set of solar panels (you can get them from EcoFlow). Nevertheless, if you intend to use the device continuously, I don’t think that’s a fantastic method to power it.
The EcoFlow Delta Pro and as much solar electricity as you can connect to that power station are the most effective ways to power it for continuous operation. It has a DC connector that can receive power directly from the Delta Pro, saving energy by avoiding the need to convert the power from DC to AC and back again. Alternately, you can power it with any 700-watt power source. I experimented with it using a Jackery Explorer 2000 Pro.
TESTING AT HOME I wanted to test the AC at home before I take it camping and want to rely on it to keep me from being miserable. It appears to be fairly good and suitable for camping.
It needs 700 watts to charge and emit chilly air, as I said previously. On my Jackery, it could run for over three hours, or with 1200 watts of solar panels in excellent sunlight, it could run forever. While the room is still cooling down, the EcoFlow Waves 1000 Wh add-on battery only draws roughly 400 watts once it is fully charged.
According to this, the add-on battery has a 2.5-hour capacity, but the device appears to have a variable-speed compressor. The space eventually draws less and less power as it cools. I closed the front of the unit to make the thermostat believe the room had cooled down in order to observe what would happen. As a result, the power consumption decreased to about 30 watts (just the fan, it seems). Therefore, how long you actually spend outside the unit will depend on how well-insulated the room the AC is running in.
If you’re prepared to make a small compromise, the battery could power it for as long as you need by cycling in and out of cooling mode to ensure that it works all night without allowing things get too warm when there isn’t solar electricity to power it.
Personally, I believe the EcoFlows Delta Pro power station, a lot of solar energy, and an insulated tent similar to a Shiftpod would be the ideal setup for this. But because I don’t have any of that, I’ll just use a regular tent and the power sources I already have when I test it in the wild.
So far, it appears to be a decent alternative for glamping excursions or crises at home because of the low power consumption and the fact that it will use less power at night.
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