Surviving the summer heat can be difficult without an air conditioner. On a sweltering hot day, a ceiling fan is certainly not enough. But if you crank up the cool air, all of the temperature-related misery will melt away. If your home doesn’t come equipped with central air conditioning, trying to figure out which A/C unit is best for your house, condo, or apartment can easily make your body heat rise. Window-mounted units all pretty much look the same, but they’re rated to be effective in spaces of varying size and can require drastically different amounts of power, per hour, to use. This can make finding the right one to install in your home difficult. So, to help make your life a bit less stressful, we did the research for you.
After over 40 hours of testing 11 different models in the scorching heat of a North Carolina summer, we found that the GE Profile Series PHC08LY (available at Amazon) is the all-around best window air conditioner. It offers an agreeable balance of cooling performance, energy efficiency, modern tech integration, and stylish design.
These are the window air conditioners we tested ranked, in order:
GE Profile PHC08LY
Keystone KSTAW05B
How We Tested
How Do Air Conditioners Work?
Other Window Air Conditioners We Tested
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This reliable, feature-packed air conditioner from GE earned our top honors during testing.
This AC unit from Keystone is a great option for cooling spaces between 100 to 200 square feet in size.
We used a variety of temperature, humidity, and electrical usage sensors to test the air conditioners in this guide.
I'm Kevin Oliver. I’m a reviewer for sites like Reviewed, BGR, Freshome, and TechRadar. I have a passion for diving headfirst into complicated topics and distilling them into something worth reading. For eight years, I’ve also had success in the professional audio world as both a touring musician and a sound engineer. This qualifies me to delve into the nitty-gritty of products—like window air conditioners—where noise can be a big factor.
To make sure we were fair in our evaluation, we put 11 A/C units (ranging from 5,000 to 14,000 BTU) through their paces in the same 340 square foot room, taking into account the expected rate of cooling of each unit. After all, comparing a 5,000 BTU product and a 14,000 BTU behemoth is truly a case of apples and oranges.
We installed each air conditioner in the same room, each time making sure the temperature was as close to 80°F as possible, before turning the AC unit on at full max. Eleven temperature and humidity sensors were also set up in the room, which we used to see how long it took for the room to cool down to 70°F—both while it was empty and when there was someone in the room. A noisy unit can be a deal-breaker for bedroom use, so we measured the noise level at the center of the room using a decibel meter while the window units were running. The decibel meter was set to the dBA weighting: a corrected form of decibel measurement in which low, often imperceivable frequencies are reduced, making it a more accurate measurement of what the human ear perceives as loudness.
In addition to collecting hard data, we also evaluated the air conditioners based on a subjective basis, including how easy it was to install, replace its air filters, understand its manual, and use each unit. We took the weight, general awkwardness, ease of storage, and portability of each unit into account. And since no one wants an AC unit that excessively ratchets up their power bill, we measured the power consumption of each unit using an electricity usage monitor.
Back in the day, the best way to keep cool was to spend your days below ground or in the shade where the heat of the sun couldn't slowly roast the joy out of your life. That all changed in 1902 when Willis Carrier invented the first electrically-powered air conditioner. It was a massive device designed to pump cool air into large spaces, such as a warehouse or a movie theatre. Over the next century, air conditioners have changed a lot—you can now buy a room unit small enough to fit in your bedroom window. Central air conditioners have become powerful and affordable enough to chill an entire house, unlike the expensive massive evaporative coolers of days gone by. But the basic principle behind how this cooling hardware has worked over the past century has remained much the same.
In basic terms, all air conditioners consist of four parts: a compressor, an evaporator, a condenser, and an expansion module. As the warm air in your home passes over the winding, tubular surface of the evaporator, refrigerant chemicals inside the tubes absorb the heat in the air. As a result, the air's temperature is cooled. As the refrigerant is heated, it transforms from a liquid to a gas. The vaporized refrigerant is sucked into the air conditioning unit's compressor. Here, the refrigerant is, well, compressed, raising both the amount of pressure it's under and its temperature. The resulting hot, pressurized gas is then forced into the condenser, where it is transformed back into a liquid state as the heat in the refrigerant is radiated away. The condenser on an air conditioner is easy to identify: just look for the grid of metal fins located on the part of the A/C unit positioned outside of your home. Once the liquid refrigerant has been cooled in the condenser, it's recirculated back into the evaporator where the whole process starts all over again.
One of the fringe benefits that come from this method of cooling is that, as the air is cooled by the refrigerant passing through an AC unit's evaporator, the moisture in the air is cooled enough to transform into a liquid, which collects on the evaporator. As such, when the once-hot air is recirculated back into the room where your air conditioner is installed, it's not only cooler but also dryer--that's a huge win for those living in a humid environment. The water pulled from the air is typically channeled to drain outside of your home or, depending on the type of air conditioner in question, collected in a bin to be disposed of later.
Kevin Oliver is a valued contributor to the Reviewed.com family of sites.
See all of Kevin Oliver's reviewsWe use standardized and scientific testing methods to scrutinize every product and provide you with objectively accurate results. If you’ve found different results in your own research, email us and we’ll compare notes. If it looks substantial, we’ll gladly re-test a product to try and reproduce these results. After all, peer reviews are a critical part of any scientific process.
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