Fair play, the haters were right – this portable aircon has changed my summer
I held off, and for what?
This isn't my first heatwave, and I'd bet it isn't yours, either, but that doesn't mean I'm enjoying it. Just like how the rare occasions when it snows can bring the UK to a standstill, when it gets over 30 degrees Celsius, we tend to all get a little loopy, largely because almost no housing in this country is designed for that level of heat.
Last year, I bought my first flat in south London, and as a top-floor chunk of a Victorian house, it's unsurprisingly a bit of an oven when it's this hot, so after years of enduring the hottest parts of summer with ice packs and a stiff upper lip, I finally picked up a portable air conditioner.
Who knew? It's exactly the game-changer it's billed as, and I honestly already can't remember how I survived without it. I got my hands on a portable unit from Dreo, its Portable Air Conditioner 318S, and the bad news is that, along with almost every other well-made option out there, it's out of stock right now as people frantically try to get their hands on one.
Still, that stock will surely come back in soon enough (albeit not in time for this particular wave of hot days and sweaty nights. So, would I recommend the 318S for when it's back and available? Absolutely, no surprises here.
This is a unit that rests on wheels, giving it that apparent portability, but like many others that you could opt for, it's important to give that fact some context. This thing weighs a whole heap, at 22.5kg, and that means rolling around my flat isn't the simplest process, especially where carpets enter the equation.
Still, I have moved it between rooms to change where my cooling's happening without any real trouble, so that's a big plus point for single-level homes. I've mostly been using it to cool either my bedroom or my living room, and each is a similar size – about 15 square metres, so not that large.
Each cools down really noticeably and quickly when the unit is turned on, although in both cases I've struggled to actually get it down to the point where the unit's "Auto" mode chills out and powers down a little, largely because getting rooms airtight in this sort of older property isn't too easy (especially with cats who want to roam and hate closed doors).
The unit has a great remote control that can set it up anyway you like, including setting up a timer to power down after a few hours, but it's also app-connected through your Wi-Fi network. This means you can control it from anywhere, provided its connection holds, so you could get your room of choice cooling down when you're on your way home, for instance. You can also set it up for voice controls through Siri, Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
That's a great addition, but I'm even more impressed by something easier to achieve – documentation. Dreo makes the unit's manual and various tutorials super easy to find in the app, which I just know I'll be thankful for if it ever throws an error code or I need to set up a different window mount.
Going from the room it's active in to any other part of my flat, though, is a depressing endeavour, so the impact it has is seismic. Key to that impact is its venting, of course. There's basically no such thing as a portable air conditioner that doesn't have a host to ventilate the hot air away, and in this case, Dreo packs in a few window kit solutions to make it easy to fit.
I'm choosing to ignore the insulating foam and adhesive options, so that I can more easily move the window block between rooms, and I've found that just using a dishcloth to block the crack above where it sits in my window frame does a good enough job of ensuring that hot air isn't blowing back into the room.
There are other systems in the box for other window types, although it's worth realising they're all fairly narrow – checking your window dimensions before you buy the 318S might be worth the effort.
Impressively, Dreo also says that the cooling mode (as opposed to the dehumidifying dry one) on the 318S can be drainage-free in the right conditions, saving you a fiddly and potentially messy regular job. All I can say is that mine has now run for a few dozen hours at least without prompting me to empty it, which is a pretty terrific plus point, too.
All in all, I'm left with basically no regrets now that the huge tide of cardboard and polystyrene packaging is off and recycled. I'm sleeping like a baby at night, on evenings I know without any doubt would have ended me without it.
