A portable air conditioning unit for your home is one of the best investments you can make if you live in an area that has hot summers, or indeed if you live in a place that has a hot climate for some, most or all of the year. That's because its a real pleasure to be able to sit in comfort in a room that has its temperature pleasantly set at level many degrees lower than the blistering outside heat, knowing that you are not wasting huge amounts of power to cool your entire house when you can only occupy one room at a time!

Sure, for families whose members are likely to be occupying different rooms in the house then a whole house air conditioning system can be a wiser choice, but for people who live alone, or even for couples living together who want to keep their power bills to an affordable level, a single room portable air conditioner is an intelligent choice. Lets look at why this is.

Portable Air Conditioning Unit Benefits

There are several benefits associated with owning a portable air conditioning unit. Probably the most important of those is the fact that they can save you a lot of money both in the short term and also in the long term.

In the short term, the savings are obviously in the installation costs. For whole house air conditioning or installations where air conditioner units are installed in each room of the house the initial costs are very high.This is due the fact that several units need to be installed with their corresponding outside units for expelling the hot air. A single portable air conditioning unit is only a fraction of that cost to buy.

In the long term the savings are on power consumption. While a comparable portable room air conditioner unit can use slightly more power than a dedicated room unit, this is not always the case and moreover, only one unit is running. When you have several fixed units in various rooms in the house, the temptation is to leave some or even all of them running so that should you or another family member decide to move from room to room, then they will always enter a nice cool room.

What happens in reality in this situation is that all these air conditioning units are left running while nobody uses the rooms, so all that power is wasted. That power has to be paid for and that's when you receive the coronary inducing quarterly utility bill for your crazy electricity consumption. Its a stupid mistake you only make once.

With a single portable air conditioning unit, this cannot happen. That's because you only have the one unit that is ever running. It keeps the room that you are occupying cool, which means you are only using electricity to run the one unit. I think you can see where the vast saving in power consumption lies!

Using a Portable Air Conditioning Unit Sensibly

The sensible way to get the best use from a portable air conditioning unit is to set the unit's thermostat to a comfortable setting so that you don't end up with a room that feels like the inside of a walk-in meat freezer! After all, you want a room temperature that is comfortable to be in, and that is generally around 72 degrees Fahrenheit (25ºC) give or take a couple of degrees for individual preferences. To achieve that temperature, any air conditioning unit does not have to work so hard, and therefore will not use so much power to do so.

If there are several members to a household, the problem will arise where different people will want to occupy different rooms at the same time. This can be fixed by having more than one portable air conditioner unit that can be placed in different rooms. However, if the need is for more than three or four units, then it can be a more sensible option to have whole house air conditioning fitted as this will use less power.

But where there are only one, two or three members of a household, portable air conditioning units are definitely the way to keep the power utility bills to a sensible level. Some diligence is required to ensure that during the times you are all occupying the same room, say whilst watching TV in the family room, then only the one unit needs to be running. When you go to bed later, units can be moved into the necessary rooms (or a child's bedroom can have its own dedicated unit) and then left running on a very low thermostat power setting overnight, or even set on a timer to switch off after an hour or so by which time you'll be asleep and not need it!

There are plenty of common sense options available to you when you make use of air conditioning in whichever form you decide to have in your home. As long as you exercise that common sense and only have units cooling rooms where there are people occupying them, then you will not waste so much power and be kinder to the environment while being kinder to your bank balance when the quarterly utility bill drops through the letterbox!