Answered
Can you make a window air conditioner portable?
The previous answer was "Yes It is totally portable. You will need a portable extension cord also or a portable AC generator." It is self-evident that it is portable in the s…ense that you can uninstall it from one place and reinstall it elsewhere. However, the normal use of the word "portable" when it comes to air conditioners is that you can move it from one room to another as opposed to keeping it fixed in the window or wall. Check this out by looking up "portable air conditioners" at virtually any appliance website. The problem with air conditioners is that the way they work is to use air to add room heat to a fluid (compressed Freon), which is inside the coils, and this fluid is circulated inside the air conditioning coils to the outside part of the air conditioner, where it then exchanges the heat it has picked up by giving it to the outside air. The cooled freon (or other fluid) is then recirculated back into the room part of the air conditioner where it picks up more heat. So if you took an air conditioner and put it down on your living room floor and turned it on, it would certainly start exhausting cold air out the front panel. The problem is that it would also be emitting heat out the back through the coils, and, since the system is not 100% efficient, the heat would not merely neutralize the cold air that is coming out the front: it would actually start getting warmer in the room, because the air conditioner is not only inefficient, it is also performing mechanical work that creates heat, such as from the motion of the fan. Study thermodynamics. With a portable unit, you have to have a specific exhaust, and a portable unit cannot effectively recirculate air for the reason I mentioned: it has to have an exhaust for hot air. So a normal window or through-the-wall air conditioner is not portable in that sense because it has no method for getting rid of the heat it has picked up other than by throwing it back into the room, since there is no way to cool the heated up part of the coils. (MORE)
