How is this air conditioner possible?
Lately I've been seeing ads for a portable air conditioner that only needs to be plugged in, with no venting or other connection outside the room it is supposed to cool. That makes no sense. You can't just poof away heat, only move it elsewhere. Real air conditioners use electrical power to push heat from in the room to outside, which is why they are vented outside. However, a stand-alone unit has no place to push the heat that isn't right back into the room it is trying to cool.
Here is a picture from an ad showing the device just sitting on a desk:
Here is a snippet from the same ad that supposedly "explains" how it works:
It pulls surrounding warm air into the unit, moves it thru a precision-engineered internal cooling chamber, and delivers a concentrated stream of cold air directly into the room. No refrigerant. No compressor. No window kit. No tools. You plug it in, press a button, and the room drops 30 degrees in under two minutes.
This seems like a blatant fraud. But I've been seeing these ads for several months on web sites of major corporations. I would have thought such a fraud would have gotten the attention of authorities by now and been shut down, or by the site owners to protect their reputation.
What's going on here? Is there some physics I'm missing that makes this possible?
3 answers
Relax, the laws of thermodynamics still hold.
The device may well cool you down if you provide some sweat for it to evaporate. I'm sitting (and sweating) in front of a fan as I type this and it's cooling me very nicely ...and heating the room at the same time of course.
I was curious. and found the pictured device on Mr. B's A.com site.
The "room drops 30 degrees in under two minutes" claim is absurd. Consider the power needed to raise room temperature 30 degrees in 2 minutes. Now try to get those kW from the device's 2000mAh battery that "lasts 24 hours". A few mWminutes to lose 30 degrees? Server-farms world-wide would be hammering at the manufacturer's front door if it were true!
Is it an "air conditioner"? I suppose adding momentum to some air molecules is arguably a change of condition, but that expression is conventionally used to describe a heat-pump that transfers heat from/to inside to/from outside. This device doesn't!
It's a fan!
Mr. B's site says it weighs over 300kg. Whaaaat? Portable?? Desktop???
There are variants that exploit phase-change i.e. the device provides the sweat and pushes the cooler air resulting from the latent-heat capture. Misting systems depend on this ...and they work. I'm tempted to add one to my patio as our summers get really hot these days.
This device ...they don't make bargepoles long enough to tempt me to touch it.
This is a basic rechargeable desktop tower fan that is obviously subject to some kind of online marketing push. It has nothing to do with air conditioning at all.
In the UK it is available on Amazon from a couple of Chinese drop-shipping companies with names like "SWZEC-UK" and "LYFDMJ", one of which is just launched and has no feedback, and another has dozens of 1-star reviews complaining that items were fake or mis-sold. Both of the Amazon products I found have "air conditioner" in the title, but in the product description they admit that it just a "desktop tower fan". All of the listed specs are made-up and inconsistent numbers: one claims that it has a "cooling power" of 2 kW but consumes only 5 W, while another listing of the same product claims it consumes 1 kilovolt but only makes 1 dB of noise.
The EpiCooler brand in the UK has a website that is obviously AI-generated, lists no prices or recommended retailers, and all of the links go to a click tracking site. Its TrustPilot page was only created in February, claims the company is based in Lithuania, and is full of reviews saying that the product was just a fan, if it was ever delivered at all. All of the supposed 5-star reviews are from people just asking questions, or saying that the ordering process was easy but they haven't actually received the product yet.
So no, there is no magic physics involved here. It's just a fan being pushed as an "air conditioner" by obviously untrustworthy companies. Why hasn't it been shut down by the authorities? The wheels of justice turn slowly, while setting up fake websites and ads takes minutes, especially when AI is available and the same product is being pushed by multiple (possibly fake) companies.
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Maybe it is more than just a fan!
I found very divergent seller-descriptions of the product (unfortunately not the 30 degrees in 2 minutes claim that you report).
Site in USA states that it uses "German-inspired evaporative cooling". A phase-change should actually provide cooled air! No mention of how the evaporating liquid (water?) is stored/presented for evaporation/replenished. There are also limits to how effective this mechanism can be in a semi-closed environment like a room - it increases room humidity which reduces "evaporative cooling" ...eventually to nothing (and high humidity is itself undesirable for a human trying to cool down since it reduces sweat-evaporation similarly).
The same site also claims a "no-drilling wall mount" and gives the device's weight as 700 pounds (over 300 kg). 300kg held up on the wall by ?? velcro/sticky-tape/magic is not realistic. It also says "Easily move this portable wall AC wherever cool air is needed" and suggests using it "as a dual-use floor standing and wall mount air conditioner". I haven't tried lifting a 300kg object up to a magic wall-mount, but Wikipedia's list of current weight-lifting records does not include a lift of more than 261kg. Not "easy" enough for me.
Several sites agree that the device is 3.5 x 3.5 x 12.2 inches. Some photos show the device close to keyboards, screens, people so that size is credible. A lump of gold that size is under 50kg, so the 300kg is ludicrous.
Site in Costa Rica states that it weighs 700 grams!
Site in India states "Wattage: 500". The 5V 2000mAh battery (10Wh) might last just over a minute at 500W, but would more likely self-destruct in the first few milliseconds if there is no fuse or other protection mechanism.
On the web-sites that provide a star-rating, the device gets around 2 out of 5 stars, so it does seem to do something ...but not enough to meet the purchaser's expectations.
I could not find a specification anywhere that made sense! With absurd inaccuracies in the sales blah-blah, how can a wannabe purchaser arrive at rational expectations?
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