You said servicing the central AC will certainly be cheaper in the long run. That’s wrong.

It might be, but it depends on a lot of other factors.

You seem to be biased against window ACs for some reason, and seem hell bent on misinforming people about them.

Decent modern window ACs will have a higher baseline efficiency than older full house units, and cool just the room you want. Conduction losses through the wall are minimal compared to trying to to cool literally 10x as much space. They are incredibly easy to DIY, and cost $500 up front, but you’ll get half that back when you sell it when you’re done with it. Literally the same price as the AC tech who’s gonna come out and say that you need to install more return ducts, insulation, or another unit to keep up with the increased average outdoor temperature.

Like literally everything else, some are built cheaply, some are built well. Look up reviews before you buy.

Anecdotally it seems to be the case for me. I switched from the A series to the Pixel and I’m pretty disappointed in how quickly my battery life has degraded.

Yeah for new installs but service for the existing unit might be like $200 for a cleaning and it’s certainly going to be cheaper to run in the long run

No, it’s not necessarily.

From an electricity usage standpoint, it’s cheaper to inefficiently cool one room than it is to efficiently cool a whole house.

Cleaning it also may solve nothing, it’s $200 on a chance of it solving the problem. If cleanliness wasn’t the issue, then you just wasted $200. On the flip side, you can find a used window AC for $200 easily, or buy a new one for $400 and then sell it when you’re done with it and get $200 back, and it is guaranteed to solve your problem assuming you’re concerned with a specific room.

While the dual hose ones are better, I agree that these all kind of suck because you have the compressor inside and it’s always the loudest part of an AC.

This isn’t actually necessarily true if you just need specific cooling.

If for instance, you just care about cooling your bedroom for sleeping, then it can be more efficient to install a window unit in just that room and let the rest of your house be warmer. A mini-split would be more efficient than a window unit for that role, but they’re also a lot more expensive and permanent.

So you have three options, I’m going to break them down just because I think comparing all three is helpful for long term planning, but skip to the end for advice on a specific window unit.

1. Upgrading your central AC and/ or it’s duct work.

• Cons:
  • 💰 Expensive - central units are expensive
  • 🧑‍🔬 Installation - these require professional installation from certified technicians.
  • 🪚 Duct work - if it requires duct work changes then modifying the house to accomodate is a whole nother headache.
• Pros:
  • 😸 Efficiency / long term electricity savings - a newer central AC will be more efficient for cooling the whole house down. They typically have SEER ratings in the 15-18 range.
  • 🔇 Noise - you might hear them start up, but most rooms of the house hear nothing from the vents.
  • ☀️ Light - they don’t impact natural window light at all
  • 🌡️Heat Pump - newer units are typically heat pumps that can efficiently and economically heat your house in the winter or at least shoulder seasons.

2. Getting a window unit.

• Cons:
  • 🌥️ Light Reduction - Blocks some of the window
  • 😿 Efficiency - Typically* lower efficiency ratings
  • 🔊 Noise - You’ll inherently have more noise from a fan blowing cold air into the room (compared to a central vent), and because the outdoor compressor unit is so close, most window units* also have quite a lot of sound coming from the outdoor portion.
  • 🥶 AC Only - Typically no heat pump capabilities.
• Pros:
  • 🫰Cheap - Lowest up front cost
  • 👨‍🔧 Easy installation - DIY
  • ↪️ Portability - Can be removed or sold later if it’s not needed.
  • 😸Efficiency? - while central AC units are typically more efficient on a per unit of cooling basis, if your window AC is in the right room it can actually be more efficient overall. i.e. if it’s in your bedroom, even if the window unit is less efficient than a central one, you might use less electricity just cooling your bedroom and letting the rest of the house get warmer.

3. Mini - Split Systems - install a compressor outside your house and a blower unit in a specific room or hallway

• Cons

  • 💲💲Expensive - these are more expensive than window units up front by quite a bit.

  • 🙇/👩‍🔧 Installation - Potential DIY - while they do sell DIY mini-split systems that don’t require professional installation, you’ll be limited by the length of pipe / hoses they provide, so need a suitable spot for your compressor unit. Otherwise you’ll need a pro to install it.

  • 🔉Noise - since the compressor is outside and separated by a wall you shouldn’t hear it if it’s mounted properly, but you do still have an indoor blower unit. It’ll be quieter than a window unit but louder than a vent.

• Pros
  • ☀️ Light - no light blocking
  • 🐸 Efficiency - Mini splits often have efficiency ratings that meet or exceed central units, on top of the fact that they can be used to just cool the needed room.
  • 🌡️Heat Pump - these are also typically heat pumps.

If it were me personally, and I owned the house, and I was worried about cooling my bedroom, and I had the money and somewhere to mount the compressor, I would buy a DIY mini split system. I will always want my bedroom to be cold for sleeping and the rest of the house doesn’t need to be that cold (and vice versa in winter since they’re heat pumps that go both ways). The only real downsides are the very light fan noise from the blower unit, and the upfront cost, though that can potentially be mitigated if you live in a jurisdiction that offers some type of home retrofit or heat pump grant (worth checking!).

That being said there’s a bunch of caveats and criteria there that I personally didn’t meet, so I bought one of those Midea U shaped units that everyone talks about and am honestly very happy. There was a massive recall recently, but they’re adding drains to fix the issue, and these units otherwise are way better than most other window units, though they only work with windows that slide up and down vertically.

*But unlike most other window ACs, the U shaped units have the window sit between the outdoor unit and the indoor unit which blocks most of the noise from the compressor, lets more natural light come in, and doesn’t require blocking the sides. They’re also very efficient with a CEER rating of 15.

Even despite the recall they’re still what I’d personally recommend, you might be able to find one second hand.

Also note that I don’t consider a portable air conditioner an option. They’re terrible.

You also have to remember to have that adapter with you

It’s still just as crazy.

Israel only does what it does because the US lets it and arms it. That doesn’t happen because of a pro Israel lobby, that happens because the US military likes having an extremely armed, and intelligence gathering ally right in the middle of an otherwise volatile and hostile region.

Old man yells at cloud isn’t an age, it’s a bitter mindset.

Exactly, even if you had no front end language at all, and just requests to backend servers for static html and CSS content, those sites would still suck because they would ship the first shitty server that made them money out the door and not care that it got overloaded or was coded garbagely.

No one cares about whether or not they use a dashboard to track signals intelligence data. The interesting part of this story is the unpublished assassination weapon, not how they selected targets.

Lmao, oh yes bruv, let’s provide our users with a card catalog to find information on our website.

It worked for hundreds of years so it’s good enough for them right?

People want pleasant UXs that react quickly and immediately to their actions. We have decades of UX research very clearly demonstrating this.

An fuck off with these dumbass, utterly vacuous Anti JavaScript rants.

I’m getting so sick of people being like “I keep getting hurt by bullets, clearly it’s the steel industry that’s the problem”.

Your issue isn’t with JavaScript it’s with advertising and data tracking and profit driven product managers and the things that force developers to focus on churning out bad UXs.

I can build an insanely fast and performant blog with Gatsby or Next.js and have the full power of React to build a modern pleasant components hierarchy and also have it be entirely statically rendered and load instantly.

And guess what, unlike the author apparently, I don’t find it a mystery. I understand every aspect of the stack I’m using and why each part is doing what . And unlike the author’s tech stack, I don’t need a constantly running server just to render my client’s application and provide basic interactivity on their $500 phone with a GPU more powerful than any that existed from 10 years ago.

This article literally says absolutely nothing substantive. It just rants about how websites are less performant and react is complicated and ignore the reality that if every data tracking script happened backend instead, there would still be performance issues because they are there for the sole reason that those websites do not care to pay to fix them. Full stop. They could fix those performance issues now, while still including JavaScript and data tracking, but they don’t because they don’t care and never would.

Yeah, HTML is simple and completely and utterly static. Its simple to the point of not being useful for displaying stuff to the user.

Clearly that’s indicative of you two both being accurate in your assessments.

Totally couldn’t be an old man yells at cloud situation with you two separated by close to a decade…

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Yeah, it’s explicitly distinct from const a: String which says it won’t change, and var a: String, which means this is legacy code that needs fixing.

Why aren’t the data brokers being charged with accessory to murder?

Writing stuff down with pen and paper is an objectively better way to remember things then digital files, also way more secure unless you really, really know what you’re doing.

It’s not, that’s a you and your partner thing. Healthy relationships have space for independence and personal hobbies in them.