Venting your portable air conditioner ensures that you have an efficiently functioning unit for cooling air and hot air needs to be fully exhausted outside.
Portable air conditioners are one of the best types of cooling units for the convenience of mobility that they offer you. If you are looking to spot cool or have cooling in any space you occupy, a portable unit can be moved around the house or space you are in.
When moving the unit, however, you need to ensure that the hot air extracted by the portable air conditioner can be released somewhere besides in the space being cooled. Your portable air conditioner removes hot air, but does this air need to be vented outside?
Venting a portable air conditioner
Before you buy a portable air conditioner, you need to consider how you are going to install it in your home. Air conditioners cool the air in the room and for that to be achieved, hot air needs to be extracted from the air in that space.
Portable air conditioners work the same way but need to remove a lot of the humidity in the room to cool it efficiently. When extracting hot air, your unit needs to have an outlet from which it can expel the hot air out to cool the space.
Do you have to vent a portable air conditioner?
Portable air conditioners are a popular option for people who would rather have a self-contained cooling system in their home that does not require complicated installation.
They offer you a more temporary installation than other units that require complex, permanent installation in parts of the home such as through walls.
Since portable air conditioners extract hot air from a room, your unit needs to have a way of releasing this hot air anywhere but into the room it is trying to cool.
This requires the air conditioner to have an outlet through which to vent hot air. Portable air conditioners need to be vented for them to efficiently cool the air in the room.
The standard way of venting your air conditioner is through a window using the venting kit provided with the air conditioner or one that you buy yourself.
The venting kit contains certain components that you need to attach the exhaust hose to the window opening. If you have to buy your own venting kit, Amazon has some options you can consider.
| Venting kit tools | Description | Amazon price |
| Kerykwan vent kit | ||
| · Humanised rail design that is easy for sliding the seal plate with fast lock
· Made of high-quality PVC and premium ABS · Simple and stable fixing method for installing and disassembling easily |
$46.99 | |
| JTooliofe vent kit | ||
| · Compatible with LG, Haier, and other air conditioner accessories
· Quality material made of durable PVC · Good sealing with a plate that is embedded in the window rail and clamped |
$27.99 | |
| Gulrear vent kit | ||
| · Great for vertical and horizontal sliding windows
· Easy to set up · Compatible with 5.0-inch diameter exhaust hoses |
$27.99 | |
| Generic plexiglass | ||
| · Made of acrylic PET
· Durable, weather and UV-resistant, and stronger than glass panels · Non-toxic and eco-friendly |
$6.99 | |
If you do not vent your portable air conditioner, the unit will struggle to extract and discard hot air in the room as there will be no way to release it from the room. Trying to operate a portable unit without venting it is ineffective as it will not cool efficiently.
Is it possible to get away with not venting the unit?
A portable unit needs to have a way of exhausting the hot air it extracts from a room, outside. It is not possible to get away with not venting the unit as there are many ways to vent it even without a window.
Venting can be done through sliding doors, through a hole in a wall big enough to fit the unit’s exhaust hose, through a drop-ceiling for rooms without windows, or through a dryer vent, but this is not recommended.
What if you have a casement window?
It is possible to vent your portable air conditioner through casement style windows. Casement windows open like doors, so using a standard window venting kit does not work in this case and therefore, you will need plexiglass to assemble your makeshift ventilation outlet.
You need to remove one of the windowpanes and replace it with a layer of plexiglass. After this, you need to cut out a hole big enough for the exhaust hose and your unit should vent properly.
Ensuring hot air is exhausted outside freely
The key to installing your portable air conditioner through a window correctly lies in ensuring the hot air in the room is escaping to the outside and is not staying in the room.
If hot air finds its way back into the room and the unit is not cooling it, your vent has not been installed correctly. Positioning the exhaust hose in a way that the air can flow out of the space freely helps hot air escape.