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?

posted 3 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

3mo ago

Olin Lathrop‭

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